Macquarie University-MKGT205 Individual Business Analysis

Assessment 3: Business Analysis Report

Due: Week 13
Value 40 marks
This assignment gives you the opportunity to examine how companies operate in the business environment. Writing an effective business report is a necessary skill for communicating ideas in the business environment. The key to a good report is in-depth analysis of company and its environment to show the reader how the writer has interpreted the findings. The lecturer will select a number of B2B companies and you have to select only one of these companies and write your report. To write your report you only have to use secondary data. You find secondary data from library, company’swebsite and report, industry report, newspapers, management journals, trusted websites, etc. Your report should be 2500 words ± 10%. When analysing your selected B2B company, you should identify and select a specific business to business theory / theories as a foundation for your analysis. In your report, you have to address following issues:

•    Introduce your chosen company, addressing the scale of their operations, past performance, the markets they operate in, and their product range. In your introduction, you must identify whether your company serves a business-to-business market or both business-to-consumer market and business-to-business market. You may need to use secondary data to develop a compelling introduction to your chosen firm. Use graphs, charts, and table if necessary.

•    Identify your organisation’s most significant competitors. You have to outline the strengths and weaknesses of these competitors relative to your chosen company. Note you should analyse only three competitors for this section of your report.

•    Identify and describe the target market for main products in your chosen company’s overallproduct range. In this section, you have to identify the major customers for your chosencompany and provide a very short summary of who these customers are and what their main strengths are. Further, you need to identify the main supplier of raw materials for the selected products in your selected firm and identify their main strength. You only have to analyse three products and one supplier and one customer for each product.

•    Identify and discuss the different types of secondary data your chosen company could use for marketing purposes of products you identified. Further, you have to explain what criteria you use to assess the quality of this information and its appropriateness for use in decision-making.

•    For the three main products you identified in your chosen company, critically analyse their marketing mix (i.e. price, promotion, and place) using relevant theory.

•    Identify two macro environmental trends that are relevant to your chosen company. Discuss how your chosen company can improve its marketing mix in view of the macro environmental trends you identified only for the three products you selected.