NPO #33: Pack to School

 

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

Looking for Work.

Greetings, Ticketholders and potential employers!

Today's article, which is less of an article and more of a portfolio showcase in line with my earlier New Piece Offerings publications, wherein I shared old poetry and essays with a "how it's done and what I could do better if I wrote it now" educational style.

And because it's Back to School month (I haven't decided yet if I'm going to make this a regular occurrence for the month, but school generally resumes in September), I've put together this adaptation of my capstone presentation at WGU for your education, information, and amusement.

So please remember to Enroll As A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment a piece of your mind at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read because I have to start paying my student loans soon and teachers probably get paid more than I do, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see, and receive the latest news on my extracurricular content.

For context, the following presentation is academic in nature, so the company I am "working for" is fictional. They are Prime Apparel, a camping, hiking, and otherwise outdoors-focused clothing and backpack retailer, who are looking to diversify into the School Supply market in time for the Back to School season, and have "hired" me as a marketing strategist to devise and propose a marketing campaign strategy that I think would be effective in helping Prime Apparel breach the market. I have been given curated research data and expert opinions through "correspondence" (a separate pdf file of company information and e-mailed summary data) with Prime Apparel's Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) to help inform my strategy.

First, I will go slide by slide and show the script that went with each one, including metacognitive notation as needed, followed by the video of the presentation and additional notes and criticism.

Good [morning/afternoon/evening], members of management and marketing.
I am here to propose a marketing campaign strategy to help Prime Apparel gain a presence in the upcoming Back to School season.

This will feature a review of Prime Apparel itself, as well as market and industry data. Then a brief SWOT Analysis of Prime Apparel, followed by a summary and justification for our target audience for this Back-to-School season, and finally, an explanation of the chosen time table, marketing channels, and contents of our campaign launch.

Prime Apparel is an employee-owned business founded by two former technology executives with a focus on high-quality materials, durable utilitarian products, and a location-based retail strategy. While the company continues to be profitable, its current marketing and retail strategies have contributed to slow sales and reduced brand recognition.

Note: These first three slides are an introduction to the presentation, myself, and the company.

As Prime Apparel’s chief niche audience are backpack commuters, our online presence is lacking, and we intend to establish market share for the upcoming Back to School season, an important industry fact that has informed our suggested marketing strategy is that online accounts for forty-six percent of Back to School purchases, with the majority going toward Clothing and Accessories, which includes backpacks. This is roughly a $12.6 billion space, according to current market research. This works out to between $235 and $310 of expenditures in this category per household, for a potential market size of between 40 million and 53 million households.

Note: The requirement for this slide was to choose an industry fact that would serve as a basis and/or defense for my proposed campaign strategy. I chose said industry fact because it justifies Prime Apparel entering the desired market and establishing an online presence, which it "currently" lacks. The majority of practical assessments like this have the same basic idea: an established fictional company is stuck in its old ways and needs help modernizing and/or growing; teach them what you believe to be common sense and defend your reasoning with industry and/or company data. Obviously, the real world is rarely so idealistic and simple as "company with no online presence needs to establish an online presence to grow its audience and expand market share" because there are many financial, legal, environmental, and logistical barriers to otherwise simple solutions in reality. But understanding of the concept is what matters here.

According to the above competitive market share breakdown, Prime Apparel only accounts for one percent of the overall backpack market, with our chief competitors collectively accounting for another 14.3 percent market share, and minor competitors and an untapped customer base making up the remainder.

This “Other” portion of the market, as well as Prime Apparel’s current lack of online presence, present a wealth of opportunities for growth, which will be summarized on the following slide.

Note: This is more "understand the data and use your industry fact and comprehensive Marketing knowledge to further justify market entry and demonstrate growth potential" application and analysis, but from a Market Share perspective. Some figures not visible in the above two slides were calculated and stated in the script and presentation video for summary purposes.

Based on the above SWOT Analysis, Prime Apparel packs have many selling points that will appeal to both Back to School students and their parents, such as an appealing balance of quality and price, high-rated straps among students, and overall durability of our backpacks. However, marketing and staffing expenditures need to be increased so we can establish an online presence (including an online storefront, digital advertising, promotional blogs, and social media marketing, among other channels), which could improve our brand awareness, market power, and ultimately, our in-store footprint. Note that breaking into an online space for the first time will make Prime Apparel’s products susceptible to competitive backlash, shifting preferences among children, and existing reviews and competitor endorsements on parenting blogs. As such, we will need to stay apprised of style trends such as color, zippered vs. drawstring, square vs. rounded top, pack size, number and function of compartments, etc., and possibly increase our licensing budget to account for pop culture logos or characters to include on backpacks in our more youth-oriented portfolio.

Note: For the non-business readers among you, a SWOT Analysis is a four-quadrant visualization of a company's Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Strengths and Weaknesses are internal to the company, like good or bad brand reputation, organizational culture, financial position, innovation level, etc. Basically, things about the company itself that it has control over. Opportunities and Threats are external to the company, like a competitor going out of business (availability of new resources for expansion) or barriers to market entry (like a competitive, saturated marketplace).

Admittedly, I got ambitious and succumbed to scope creep, and as I said above, mentioning financial expenditures isn't always the best way to get a company to agree to something. In the real world, I would be among several presenters with a variety of approaches, and whether my proposal was selected would be down to the C-Suite doing a cost-benefit analysis, so mentioning expenditures is not a death knell if you can offer justifications and/or enticing enough future benefits to outweigh the costs of implementation and execution.

Our target market should be middle-class parents of children aged six to eighteen, who are heavily invested in their children’s well-being and care more about the intersection of price and quality than the prestige of a given label. Not only is this the ideal segment to target for the Back to School season, the associated segmentation variables, shown above, fit Prime Apparel’s product strengths perfectly. Students prefer our products’ shoulder straps, which are comfortable, durable, and ergonomically beneficial, which applies to the students’ well-being, and as a lesser-known brand with a reasonable intersection of Price and Quality, Prime Apparel satisfies the third segmentation variable as well.

Note: The requirement for this slide was to choose a target market and three segmentation variables (details and qualities that further define the target demographic). The target market selection was based on a suggestion from the pdf of correspondence and data I mentioned above. Single or married is just a base-covering gimme variable. What matters to the overall argument are the other two (also found in the pdf file), as they tie back into the SWOT Analysis as a way of minimizing the potential Threat of competition and damaging reviews in the company's eyes and playing into the Strengths of Prime Apparel's products.

Market research over a three-year period suggests that the school season generally begins in September, and the most effective duration of a Back-to-School marketing campaign is three months. As such, I would suggest starting our Back-to-School campaign in June of next year so that we can establish our online presence early, take advantage of the peak purchase times in July and August, and prepare a clearance campaign for September to account for late or last-minute shoppers.

Note: The requirement here was to choose a start date and campaign length based on the data in the given graph. No further research information was given, so I did some research of my own to corroborate my instincts with real-world data on the average length of an advertising campaign, particularly around the back-to-school time, hence the three-month window. I selected June as my proposed start date because that would end the campaign at the beginning of September, as defended above.

Preliminary market research also shows that the three campaign channels with the highest impression-to-sale conversion rates are Direct Marketing (which includes e-mail marketing, websites and/or e-shops, and unpaid social media) at thirty-one percent, Paid Search at 26.7 percent (with Google being more cost-effective and having a higher conversion count than Bing), and Paid Social at 17.2% (with Facebook having the cost and conversion advantage over other social media platforms like LinkedIn).

Note: More data analysis. The requirement here was to choose three campaign channels. It was almost as simple as taking the top three from the bundt chart on the right, but further elaboration was necessary to defend those selections based on the Conversion vs. Spend data on the left. This also serves as a test of whether the student understands cost-benefit analysis, and from a professional standpoint, gives the Marketing Strategist an opportunity to further refine and define their proposed strategy.

With regards to the content of our Campaign, our analytics team ran a three-variant form of A/B testing: one scenario with only the tagline, one which added a free shipping promotional code, and a third with a ten percent off promotional code. As you can see, we suggest the variant with the free shipping code.
Of the three scenarios, this variant ran for one to two hundred fewer sessions than the basic messaging or the ten percent code scenarios. It also had almost one and a half times the number of conversions as the ten percent scenario, and almost triple that of the basic messaging variant, leading to a conversion rate that is between four and eighteen percentage points higher than the other variants.

Note: Data analysis and understanding of market research methods. It's clever that the style here is recognizable as A/B testing, but with the added twist of a third variant, and the data makes for a simple but complicated, "there is no right or wrong answer, only a good or bad defense" scenario that I probably thought about and multi-guessed myself over much longer than I should have. But I think I made the right choice and my defense was solid.

So, in conclusion, to prepare for next year’s Back to School season, Prime Apparel should prioritize establishing a website with e-shop functionality and a company blog, as well as a multi-platform social media presence and Search Engine Optimization. We must also stay current on backpack style and form factor trends. With this foundation in place, I suggest that we begin our Back-to-School marketing campaign in June of 2024 to run until the beginning of September, with our selected target market, campaign channels, and messaging in mind.
Thank you for coming, and have a Prime day!

Note: Always summarize your points at the end of the presentation in a way that gives everything a logical flow. My only criticisms are the abrupt transition I did from the previous slide and the feeling that I got too ambitious and wordy again here. As a non-dad from the Dad Joke generation, I am oddly proud of the closing line and the cheesy imagination that went into imagining an organizational culture for Prime Apparel where Customer Service representatives tell customers to "have a Prime day!"

I may regret having publicized this video. My speaking voice is more dynamic in public than it is when recorded, so I sound boring, if not bored, in the presentation itself. This is why I blog, people! Plus, if you can sit through the video, you'll see several cuts where I removed dead air, stalls, stuttering, and flubbed lines. But when I passed the course, I was ecstatic!

Now, if only I can get someone to hire me as a copywriter, because you know I'm good!

So please remember to Enroll As A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment a piece of your mind at the bottom of this post, hire me so you don't have to help with my ad revenue as you read because I have to start paying my student loans soon and teachers probably get paid more than I do, and contact me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to hire me and receive the latest news on my extracurricular content.

Sean Wilkinson,

Hire me!