Financial Analysis

- Here you can see the cost of the event as a whole will be 0
- The formula highlighted was made so that if you change the sales target, the total profit will automatically change.

Knowledge Skills Audit

Skills /Quality - Team Working

	Skills/Qualities	How can this be used as a part of a team?
1.	Organisational skills	Can organise when meets should be.
2.	IT Skills	Can create posters, letters, essays, power point presentation
3.	Well spoken	Can present a presentation
4.	Good at maths	Can calculate very quickly, can solve mathematical problems
5.	Open minded	Being open to new ideas and work with them
6.	Taking criticism	Taking criticism and building on it to improve yourself
7.	Listening skills	Being able to listen and follow instructions carefully so that task can be carried out properly. Can listen to other peoples opinion in group, not just your own.

Skills

Skill	Summary	Confidence /Competence	Example	How to develop
Written communication	I can write clearly and concisely in a range of different formats to communicate messages effectively to varied audiences.	4	I am able to write letters, essays, and speeches without any mistakes and to suit any type of audience.	To develop this skill, I would need to practice these written forms of communication even more
Oral communication / presentation skills	I can summarise and communicate information effectively when speaking with people or delivering presentations.	3	I am able to explain things to people and make instructions clear for others to follow. Need to work on delivering presentation skills	To develop presentation skills I need to have more practice of presenting
Time management	I can manage my time and prioritise my workload to ensure that I produce high-quality work within set deadlines.	4	Throughout this year I have submitted all assignments on time and haven’t had to do any last minute work that is rushed.	To make sure im even better prepared, create a timetable scheduling what times and days I do work instead of doing it randomly
Problem-solving	I know how to find logical, constructive, and realistic solutions when I am presented with complex problems.	4
Teamwork	I am able to work effectively as a member of a team in order to help my team achieve its goals.	4	When other members in my group project weren’t doing their tasks I would go out of my way to do the tasks myself without any problems.
Leadership	I am able to use a range of approaches and techniques to lead a team towards its goals.	3	I always take the initiative in the group, I often tend to get the ball rolling as soon as a goal has been set.
IT skills	I can use IT packages (e.g. Word, Excel, and Access). I can use specialist IT packages that are specific to my particular subjects (if applicable).	5	I am very comfortable with using IT packages.	Need to familiarise myself with Microsoft access
Information skills	I am able to find sources of information (including online sources) quickly and easily. I am able to evaluate different sources of information to determine their reliability.	5	In my assignments I did this, and referenced them	I sometimes used Wikipedia which is not really a reliable source. Also double checking facts found on the internet with other sources will make information more reliable and accurate.
Independent learning	I am able to manage my own workload and complete tasks on my own with minimal input or supervision from my teachers.	5	The extended tasks given to us in the assignments are examples of supervision from teachers and I’m known to do well because I have gained distinctions. Extended tasks aren’t taught by teachers	Be more organised on the times I start work, I usually just do work when I want too. Never a timetable in place.

Explain how promotion is integrated with the rest of the marketing mix in a selected organisation to achieve its marketing aims and objectives

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The marketing mix, includes the 4p’s

Price - What is the value of the product or service to the buyer?

·         Product - What does the customer want from the product/service?

·         Promotion – Where/when can you get across your messages to your target market?

·         Place - Where do buyers look for your product or service?

If all the above are done correctly then the event will be successful in terms of followings its aims and objectives. 

In terms of promotion and how it’s integrated with the rest of the marketing mix; promotion is needed in a marketing mix for an organisation because potential customers need to be aware of the product/service, the way people will know about this, is through promotion.

There are different types of promotion that an organisation can use for them to achieve their aims and objectives. Different organisations will have different aims and objectives but in this assignment I will talk about how my group, used promotion to achieve its aims and objectives. Our aims for the event were:

·         Use market research to help us create event

·         Generate profit

·         If a positive reception, a second part of the event could be held

·         Have each member in our group to take part – have specific roles.

We carried out the event on the 9^th June. Fortunately we achieved all our aims, thanks to our promotion. However looking back at our promotion techniques; we could have added more promotion techniques and achieved much more. We generated profit, creating £10. Our event was carefully crafted because all the resources required for our event were provided by the college and group members. So the start-up cost was basically £0. So this meant that even if one person came to our event, we would have achieved one of our main aims. Like any other business would want; create a profit or break-even at least.

When coming up with the idea for the event, we had to consider the other categories in the marketing mix. Price was important because our group needed to find out how much to charge people, same for the product. These were fairly easy to create a decision on – we created a survey, as market research to see how much to charge potential customers and what product they would like. In our groups case we asked them, what game they would like. A tally chart was taken and it was easy to analyse and we put the information into a graph and we could clearly see what game category our market favoured. So we went with that. Also we aimed our survey at our target market (16-19 year olds), we took a sample of the whole college, and the survey was taken of our class of 28 students and 2 teachers.

When promoting our event, we decided to produce posters and print them around the college. We strategically placed them in areas where we thought most students would see them; Lifts, outside classrooms, corridors. We didn’t carry out market research when promoting because we felt as a group we fit into the target market – so our opinions mattered in the event. We discussed this and came to agreement and finalized that these were the best places to promote our event; our minutes and agendas can prove this.  In the poster that we created, it included all elements of the marketing mix.

Product/service – the competition we offered to customers

Place – location of the event in the college

Price – price each game was charged at

Promotion – Placing the posters in strategic areas; lifts corridors classrooms.

In conclusion, promotion was used in our groups event, to attract people to the event, in our group we did exceptionally well at this because we used only posters as a form of promotion. This was what got people to attend our event.

Explain with examples how different market research methods are appropriate to assist different marketing situations

Questionnaire is a market research method that enables a group to ask individual people about how they feel about a certain situation. This method can assist different marketing situations because it gives a clear understand of how people reacted to the questions you are asking. However you may want a lot of people to take part, but when carrying out; you may find out people won’t take part in the questionnaire. This is what happened to our group, during the event, many people said they were going to complete the questionnaire given but many didn’t. This made our evaluation and review quite hard because we didn’t get a full view of how the event was; because only a small sample of people took part.

 On the other hand prior to our group carrying out the event, we had a survey. This was a simple tally chart asking two questions.

What game would you be happy to pay to play for?
Mortal Kombat (Fighting)	Fifa (Football)	Need for Speed  (Driving)		Black Jack (Cards)

• Simple question, not any difficult words - everybody can understand.
• Says the name of the game - so people who know gaming are aware of the games that will be at the event – also type of game it is in brackets for the people who aren’t so familiar with the game names.

What would be a reasonable price that you would pay for one game?
0-49p
50-99p
£1 or more

• Question asked in a neutral matter, not bias to any category – this makes sure that people aren’t forced into picking one but by their own choice.
• Prices are placed into different categories, so they aren’t overlapping each other – if they weren’t it would be for our group to analyse and create graph and for people taking part, they wouldn’t know where to put their answer.

An interview gives a detailed response on somebody’s opinion. This is a research method that gathers qualitative information; this type of research would assist in a marketing situation of reviewing the success of the market that you had at your event. An example of this would be collecting people who attend our events contacting information; Asking them questions, relating to the event, From this a qualitative piece of information can be written and analyse. The problem with this research method is that it’s very long – it can’t be analysed as quickly as quantitative information like our survey that we carried out. It would be very time consuming for the people in our group and people taking part in the interview. The reason why our group didn’t choose this method in this marketing situation because we put ourselves in potential people who would take part; as we are off all same age group- we then came to the conclusion that we wouldn’t be happy, if we were sat down to talk about an event; as when no incentive for us has been given us to take part. For that reason why decided not to use this method.

Product sampling is a market research method that can be used to give people a physical test of product. It can only be used for products not services. Unfortunately for our groups’ event, we weren’t able to use this method for this market situation – as we were offering a competition. On the other hand, Uber- cab service. Gave new customers a promotional code, to get up to £10 free journeys, to explore the new cab service; doing this people were able to sample the service; therefore leading people to pay for the new cab service, because they were allowed to use it for free, by the use of the promotional code.  If our group holds another competition, we could possibly have the same type of sampling. Free first game and charge on the rest of the games. This gives the customer a feel of how the game is, if they want to continue then they will have to pay.

Evaluate the market research methods used by a selected organisation

In this assignment I will be evaluating the market research methods use by our group, in hosting our event.

Our group used survey as a market research method. The reason why we chose this method is because it was quick to create and easy to carry out. In the same day that we got people to take part in the survey, we also were able to create graphs and post into our blogs. This was an effective way of finding out market because it wasn’t time consuming like other research methods would have been. If we had using this research method doesn’t allow for individual opinion to be heard. As we are conducting survey we want to know peoples decision behind the answers they gave. That is the problem with this method. However not giving the option of allowing people to express their thoughts makes it easier for us to make decisions. An example is that we asked in our survey what would be a good price to pay for a game for. The majority answered 0-49p; However in the other categories (as seen below) people chose. It would have been better for our group if we knew why they made that decision and possibly could have catered for them in our event.

One of our aims for this project, was to actually hold one; then if succesfull we would do it again and would be better because we would have used the mistakes and feedback and worked on it. Having this thought in mind, when people came to play games at our event, we let them freely write down contact details if they wished to be contacted after the event, in order for us to gain feedback from them. It was two simple questions asked what went well and even better if. We didn’t give them a deadline to follow but rather we gave them an incentive; which was a chance to win a ps4. By doing this we received replies almost instantly. Some even gave feedback during their waiting time to play the next game. However with this method of customer feedback; it is not guaranteed that everyone would get back to you, especially if no incentive for the customer is left for them to do so. On the other hand feedback that was given enabled us to improve on the next event hopefully.

“Event didn’t start when it was supposed to “

“Seating was poor “

“Not enough refreshments “

“Why there wasn’t enough change made available”

These items of feedback were noted down and for any event in the future, these problems would be sorted.

Sampling method is used by medical companies to test out new drugs. Money is used as an incentive to attract people.

Telephone surveys can be used as a marketing research method but it can be annoying. It’s not as cheap as the other methods. However the cost can be lowered if it’s an automated person rather than an actually person speaking. This is very difficult because if you want to carry out research you would need a person to be speaking to potential customers because more often than not if a customer is replying to another human the person carry out the survey can adapt and empathise with the customer and try to convince the customer to take part. Whereas automated voice, doesn’t allow this, making it rather cheaper than using a person. In our group we wasn’t able to use this marketing research method because our target audience wasn’t that wide enough so it would have been useless because we are aiming at students and staff in the college.

Evaluate and justify the use of an appropriate promotional mx in relation to marketing objectives for the selected organisation

We chose posters as a form of promotion to our specific market because it was quick, easy, cheap and effective. This was the only form of promotion that we had used, meaning that people attended our even simply because they saw our poster. We decided to choose poster as a form of promotion because we would include a lot of key information on one side of A4. We design it carefully – knowing that it was aimed at college students mainly, but staff could also attend. We put the price, time, date. As a group we felt that these were the most appropriate things that would enable for our specified market to attend the event. As we did more research and began to create the actual poster. We found out these pieces of information were just basic. We came up with an idea that will attract more people to come; this was to create an incentive for people to come.  The incentive that would attract people to our event was the chance of the winner of the tournament to win a PS3. Adding this incentive possibly increased the amount of customers we had at our event. The event was held inside the college, which meant our group was permitted to use college resources; printers and computers. Meaning it didn’t cost us anything to produce this.

• Business logo added to remind customers the name of the business ‘Games 4 You’
• College logo, this was added to show that the event is just for students and staff of the college only. This is effective because it indirectly tells people that only for college partners – meaning less words are needed to be used
• Terms and conditions of the event. -Written in smaller print, because not everybody wants to read things that contains too many words. It makes the event ‘less fun’. Less focus is put on this area from all the other information in the poster if made smaller than everything else.
• Words carefully constructed – “You could win “. This doesn’t guarantee the actual wining of the Ps4 console. But it puts into the persons reading it, that they would win. Just winning 10 games in a row- would win them a ps4. This is a technique that funfair games use. Attracting the customer knowing that the winning prize is almost non-existent or impossible. If a person truly believes they are good they would enter the competition.

We couldn’t use radio  as a form of promotion mix for our marketng objectives because, our target market was college students. Having this form of promotion would mean that the scale of the target audience would be bigger than we  had planned for. Prior to the event being carried out, we were told in guidelines that only college students and staff was only allowed to attend the event. So by using this large scale promotion would have been useless to us because many more people would have heard about the event ; but wouldn’t be able to attend.

A recommendation could be including more different types of promotion could have been used, for example clothing. Adding clothing to our event and merchandise to give to customers when they left our event so that they have a physical memory of how the event was; something to take back home with them.  Not only clothing, as that would have cost a significant amount of money. Freebies like pens/pencils/sweets/ tissues.

• Having these items with our logo it. They would be cheap to produce because the college would fund us.
• Customers can keep these items 

 

Review the success of the event

	YES	NO
Did we gain profit	x
Did people use poster to find the about the event	x
Did people enjoy themselves	x
Were there anything that went wrong according to the risk assessment		x
Did our event clash in with other events		x
Was the room size big enough	x

What went well?

People attended – we only were able to use posters as a form of advertising the event. This shows that we strategically put these posters in positions where we thought students are mostly likely to see.

Nothing dangerous happened – nothing that we mentioned in our risk assessment came to pass. This means that the event was safe guarded correctly.

Income - straight profit was gained at our event because it didn’t cost us anything to provide the games. All resources came from group members – we had many attendees to money spent of refreshments were gained back and created profit.

What could have gone better?

Set out of the room – because the first TV that we initially wanted to use, was not working. We had to use a projector. Therefore we had to rush and set up the room quickly. Not really planned and had to keep adding more chairs for people to wait for their turn.

Having change for the customers – we thought we wouldn’t have to produce change for the customers , because we thought the people who come will have 50p or £1 coins. This was the case for some, but others had notes, which meant they had to leave the college and get change. It didn’t cause much hassle but it must have been annoying for somebody who is next to go and get change just to play.

Having more people to gain larger profit; in total we gained £10 from the event, if more people came then would have increased this profit.

What went wrong?

More attendees than we expected, however some of these people were just spectators and didn’t actually participate in the game.

First TV that we had planned to use wasn’t working; we then had to rush to the IT technician who allowed us to use projector; this worked out better because it was on a bigger screen, making it more comfortable for the people playing the game.