Education assistant
Marketing Strategy Analysis
Group C: Rita Chen, Siyu Chen, Songn Yu, Xinjie Chen
Introduction and Background
The company that we are going to launch is called Future Leader. The company is in
the education and training sector and the major courses that are going to be provided by
Future Leader are the SAT math training courses for students who want to depend on the
high SAT score to apply for a decent university for their undergraduate education stage. In
fact, among different sections of the SAT test, the performance of American students in
mathematics is weaker than students from other countries, causing the total SAT scores of
American students to underperform (Balingit & Van Dam, 2019). Under this scenario,
the SAT math courses that offered by Future Leader can meet the demands of students in the
United States, helping them to have a better performance in SAT, so that it is more likely for
them to apply for better universities and colleges in the United States.
The location of Future Leader is in Washington county, and the location of our
company is based on two important factors. In the first place, setting the company’s office in
Washington county can help our team to save the start-up fund to save the initial cost of the
company. In addition, Future Leader can also take the advantage of the relationship with the
local district to make more collaborations with different kinds of organizations in the district
to ensure the SAT courses offered by the company can have its seed students, which can also
save the marketing and promotion cost of the company. In detail, we are going to rent the
office together with Forest Lake public school district, so that Future Leader can ensure the
two factors that will have important influence on the start-up stage of the company can be
achieved. At the same time, since the close relationship with the Forest Lake public school
district, we can collaborate with the organization to make the students take our courses, and it
can help Future Leader to get the initial gain from this collaboration.
For the mission of our company, Future Leader will provide the most qualified and
useful SAT math courses for the students in Washington County to enable them to depend on
their high SAT score to support their future education stage. The mission statement of our
company is based on the value, interests, benefits, and future development of our customers
to show the commitment of Future Leader to their development path. Another, talking about
the vision of Future Leader, we have the ambition to become the leading organization that
has an enough large market share in
providing SAT math training courses in the United States to make all of the U.S. students to
get access to the SAT math courses provided by us. In fact, the vision of Future Leader draws
a blueprint for the future development of it.
Market Selection and Planning
Future Leader will be located in Minnesota, serving the Forest Lake public school
district. This district includes 14 public schools, offering from pre kindergarten to 12th
grade. Considered as a small size district, the district contains 6424 students in total.
The market selection strategy is based on several important demographic factors. To
start with, Forest Lake public school district has relatively more number of 8-12 grade
students compared to other similar size districts. The ratio of 8-12 grade students to total
students is 0.34, whereas other similar districts are around 0.27. Since we offer SAT math
tutoring service, the more high school students the bigger the market. Also, the district
officers are more likely to consider the majority students’ demand as prior to others, and thus
more intend to buy our service. Moreover, ethnic is another factor that contributes to the
decision. The dominating ethnicity is white in Washington county. According to the statistics,
60% of students who take tutoring is White. Thus, Washington county is big enough for us to
attract potential customers and generate profits.
In order to sell the service to Forest Lake public school district, our target market is
8-10 grade students who plan to participate in the SAT test, and are insufficient in math. The
math tutoring service will equip them with the necessary knowledge to pass the test.
Our position strategy is providing long-term substitute staff. The tutoring will happen
in school and off school times. Through investigation, it is found that SAT math is slightly
different from what students have learned in school. Some Students may feel insufficient if
they only take school math classes since school math teachers will be less-professional in
teaching SAT math if they do not receive specific training. So, our service provides tutors
with teaching SAT math over 3 years. The tutor will focus on the inadequacy of each student
and come up with related exercises targeting the essential knowledge that students need to
master. More importantly, our product distinguished from others by offering ganruanteen
service. The price is decided by the expected score rank. If the student does not achieve an
anticipated score, the service continues to provide free classes until he/she obtains the score.
Communication strategy
A firm's communication mix are the tools that the company uses to set up better
communication grounds with their consumers and other potential clients. Organizations
improve their communication mix by using social media platforms, advertising their services
and products, ensuring their product packaging is appealing, and marketing directly to the
target population. Marketing communication mix is applied in defining a firm's methods to
establish communication with their consumers (Kim & Lee, 2020). It ensures that
organizations are able to get feedback from the clients they are marketing their products to.
One of the most useful promotional tools which will be used to achieve a communication
mix is digital marketing and direct marketing. It is a cheaper method of ensuring that the firm
can effectively reach the enormous consumers in the online space. Migration to digital
technologies has ensured that social platforms use have grown continually in the last few
years. The firm will be able to target the vast crowd of users on these social media platforms
to get the needed feedback from clients (Amin & Priansah, 2019). The strategy will ensure
that the firm can use potential clients' emails to market their operations and establish direct
communication, which helps engage clients and improve their loyalty.
Moreover, the firm will utilize sales promotion to ensure that it offers customers discounted
products and services using offline and online outlet stores. It can utilize strategies such as
offering freebies, product samples, coupons, and discounted prices. It will encourage
consumers to purchase more of its products and services. As a result, it will improve its
brand loyalty, and customer retention cases will spike. Consumers will have an established
strong connection with the organization through the discounts or special offers, which will be
rewarding to the repeated consumers and the loyal clients.
In this case, the firm will utilize the affordable method and the percentage-of-sales
method to ensure that a reachable budget is set for advertising activities. The firm will use
the affordable method to determine its availability of financial resources based on its overall
operation. After deducting operation funds from the overall income, the firm will only spend
the resources it can afford to gather (Chen & Xie, 2018). The sales promotion by discounting
will be carried out after assessments of its overall sales and the targeted sales are made.
These techniques will collectively ensure the firm is able to set an attainable budget.
Sales
As for our sales team, not only TAs but also teachers are involved in the sales
process. We think there is a separation of salespeople and teachers in the market. Such a
situation will lead to some sales staff commitment, but for the teacher here is not recognized.
Therefore, we hope that a consensus among TA, teachers and students is a good sales
relationship. In addition, we believe that TA is a bridge between teachers and students. TA is
not only responsible for scheduling classes and providing feedback to both teachers and
students, but also for selling classes and handling other chores.
Regarding the teacher's teaching mode, we provide one-on-one teaching. Not only that,
but we can also adjust the teaching progress and course content according to the actual
situation of the students. For example, when the teacher finds that students lack knowledge
of exponential functions when doing a certain math problem, the teacher will give a special
lesson on exponential functions before teaching the next section. We will try our best to make
sure that students can fully understand each topic and can draw inferences about other cases
from one instance.
Our strategy is to make users willing to believe in us and then buy the course. As our
slogan says, ‘What we sell is not a course, but an idea’. When designing course products, we
start from the actual needs of students. Before customers purchase courses, we will set a
target score for students and the expected time to reach the target score. If students do not
reach this score within the specified time, they can always come to the class for free. Which
means, our pricing is depending on the target score, buy it once and enjoy it for life. For
example, we all know that the math section of the SAT has a maximum score of 800.
Therefore, I can provide 3 price plans with target points, which are 600 points and 3000
dollars respectively. 700 points for 5000 dollars and 800 points for 7000 dollars. Suppose a
student buys a plan with 600 points, then he only needs to pay 3000 dollars once, and he can
come to class until he reaches his target score of 600 points.
About our sales promotion, we offer trial classes for new students. We believe that
students can directly feel the teaching quality of the teacher. If after a class, the students are
very eager to learn, then sales will be easy. We will help students to develop an individual
learning plan or recommend good courses according to their own description/needs for them
to purchase. Regarding discounts, because our company directly connects with the
Minneapolis Public School District, if the other party provides us with enough students, we
can also give students trial lessons about other SAT test content courses. For example, other
SAT teaching companies that cooperate with our company provide writing or grammar
courses.
Reference
Amin, M., & Priansah, P. (2019). Marketing Communication Strategy To Improve
Tourism Potential. Budapest International Research and Critics Institute-Journal
(BIRCI-Journal), 2(4), 160-166.
Balingit, M., & Van Dam, A. (2019). U.S. students continue to lag behind peers
in
East Asia and Europe in reading, math and science, exams show. Retrieved from:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/us-students-continue-to-lag-behind-
peers-in-east-asia-and-europe-in-reading-math-and-science-exams-show/2019/12/02/
e9e3b37c-153d-11ea-9110-3b34ce1d92b1_story.html
Chen, Y., & Xie, J. (2018). Online consumer review: Word-of-mouth as a new element of
marketing communication mix. Management science, 54(3), 477-491.
Kim, S. H., & Lee, S. A. (2020). The role of marketing communication mix on
Korean customers' coffee shop brand evaluations. Journal of Hospitality and
Tourism Insights.