Planning Your Promotional Mix

By now you know the theme of the second semester is: You’re an entrepreneur, and you’re designing a business plan to attract investors and prove your worthy of their support of your enterprise.

The first project in this greater project is to create a promotional plan that will be included in your business plan. So, you need to:

1. Choose your business. It should be original, and I suggest that it be local to Napa Valley or at least the Bay Area. (Since some of you might come from another region of the country, you can choose another if you know the turf.) It should not be so big an idea that you can’t pull it off. For this exercise, dream only as big as you can successfully plan.
2. Think about your target market and the demographics, psychograpics and geographics of your chosen place to be sure you’re on the right track. There’s nothing more doomed to failure then a good plan at the wrong place at the wrong time. Location, location, location!
3. Devise a promotional mix for your enterprise. This mix or plan must include everything in Unit 6 that will properly promote you product or service. Don’t use methods that are appropriate to your business’s situation.
4. Build a document version of this promotional plan and a PowerPoint presentation to sell it. The “white paper” version is the one you’ll hand out to prospective investors, and the PowerPoint is how you’ll sell it at the first meeting.

Go for it and enjoy creating your own business. You might do it someday. Oh, and don’t hesitate to write your own fictional story and build your own myth, as long as it’s rooted in concrete possibilities and good business sense.

Turn in your vocabulary for Chapter 20

One more time.

Turn in your vocabulary for Chapter 19

You know the drill.

Turn in your vocabulary for Chapter 18

Here, in the comments.

A Marketing Class Slogan and a Quote

To help promote the Marketing class, please try to think up a great slogan for the class. Now, next year’s class is probably going to be called Entrepreneurship, but you can use Marketing instead if you wish.

Make the slogan catchy and short.

Also, give me a quick quote explaining why you enjoy the Marketing class and what you are getting from it.

Send this to me in a comment.

Thanks!

Understanding Promotion and Advertising

Welcome to Semester Two. As we work toward studying entrepreneurship and formulating a winning business plan, let’s learn more about what it takes to be successful in the world of commerce.

Learning how to promote and advertise products and services is key to selling a good idea in the first place. Almost nothing sells itself.

So let’s go in-depth with Chapter 17 by jigsawing the concepts and presenting them back to the class. Work together right away to assign the topics, then take ten minutes or so to prepare your oral presentations before sharing them with the class.

Oh, and we’ll go round to see how many of us have come up with some product or service to introduce in a press release, one of the first steps in promotion.