You can download the solution Analysis and Evaluation of Facebook's Marketing Strategies for free. For further assistance in Marketing Assignments please check our offerings in Marketing assignment solutions. Our subject-matter experts provide online assignment help to Marketing students from across the world and deliver plagiarism free solution with free Turnitin report with every solution.

(ExpertAssignmentHelp does not recommend anyone to use this sample as their own work.)

Marketing portfolio on Linking theory with practice

The use of market research in marketing plan 

Market research is the process of a business organisation using resources and research tools to gain insights into the market trends such as customer decision making process, purchasing power of the customers, and pricing trends of rival products. In a competitive industry, market research is conducted in order to have an understanding of the market and deploy products that are lucrative and appealing to the customer by basing the products on market research. For upmost success, it is vital that market research is conducted in the most honest manner with no bias towards any specific trend or company. 

The smartphone industry is one of the biggest industries in the world today and with a growing number of competitors in the industry, the level of rivalry is only rising furthermore. In this situation, 'One Plus' company has achieved a lot of success and mainstream popularity despite releasing only couple of phones every year. OnePlus Phones were initially launched as a budget android smartphone with top-level specification at a mid-range pricing. With this approach, OnePlus only managed to attract a niche following. However, since 2016, OnePlus has changed its product design, pricing range, and marketing methods significantly based on market research to replicate Apple iPhone to a significant degree (Maring, 2018). Apple iPhone has remained a major success with its design and marketing approach, and OnePlus has found a new level of success by trying to establish the brand as the android equivalent to iPhone. Copying Apple has apparently worked well for OnePlus with a growing number of sales and mainstream discussion of the phone (Maring, 2018).

A market does not always follow the most logical approaches and market research often leads to surprising findings that are beneficial for business strategy. The example of OnePlus branding change represents effective practical use of market research. 

Competition for a popular product 

IT technology is evolving constantly and it is represented by the growing number of software products that are coming to the market as a smart equivalent of existing products. Smart technology in everyday use products is helping drive the idea of IoT (the internet of things) coming closer to a reality. The latest innovation in this segment is of smart speakers that are equipped with an AI driven personal assistant. A favourite product in this segment of the market is 'Google Home Mini', a small size smart speaker with Google Assistant built-in. A user can use the speaker as a music player by streaming music from the internet, use it to get answers from the internet (such as ask for recipes, reading emails, booking a cab, and playing a song) by simply talking to the assistant (CNET, 2018). The experience of using Google Home is a very lucrative and the industry is growing accordingly. 

As is the case in any competitive industry, smart speaker is a popular customer segment now and accordingly, there are major rivals of Google Home in this product category – Apple and Amazon. Apple HomePod is Apple's smart speaker system that provides roughly the same features as 'Google Home' albeit through Apple's own AI assistant Siri (Segan, 2017). Competition to Apple Homepod is quite significant; however, Google Home has the advantage of having a more refined AI assistant than Apple and being able to take advantage of many popular services and not just the Apple ones, which is the case with Apple HomePod. With 'Amazon Echo' smart speaker, the competition is more comparable as Echo is priced very competitively with Google Home (Caddy & Pino, 2018), and both of these devices allow users the ability to connect to third-party services.

(Some parts of the solution has been blurred due to privacy protection policy)