Developing Strategic Marketing Plan for Indochina Junk

Abstract

From the past three years until 2019, Vietnam’s tourism industry has witnessed tremendous growth and continuously rank as one of the rapidest-growing tourist destinations in the world, with a recorded revenue exceeded US$26.75 billion by the end of 2018 according to Vietnam ministry of culture, sports & tourism. That shows the huge potential of Vietnam tourism which eventually activates many opportunities for other businesses.

Well known as the natural wonder of the world, Halong bay - Vietnam has been exploited by tourism activities since the early 2000s. The booming in numbers of companies running overnight cruise ship in Halong bay area shows how dynamic and profitable of this business is, also it is giving a hint for a tougher competition occurred within this industry. For that reason, more and more cruise ship brand has spent a big proportion of investment into their marketing mix activity in order to get competitive advantages to the other rival firms, and Indochina Junk is not an exception. With 2 years’ experience working for this top rank travel agency in Halong cruise ship business, I have a common understanding toward the company's operation and marketing process. Therefore, I choose Indochina Junk as the case company and develop a strategic marketing plan for it.

Study Objectives:

The research aims to explore and identify the tourism market potential and current marketing mix activities of those companies have been exploiting in Halong bay, Vietnam

Through further analyze, the objective of this paper is developing a strategic marketing plan for Indochina Junk to achieve competitive advantages.

Research Questions

• What is the current strategic marketing plan of the Indochina Junk?
• Who is Indochina Junk’s target market?
• What marketing tactics should be used to reach Indochina Junk’s market and goals?
• How much is the budget for launching this marketing plan?
• How to implement a new strategic marketing plan to the Indochina Junk?

Approach

For my independent study, I chose to conduct a Marketing plan which I think is necessary for the Indochina Junk right now cause of its expanding market goal in 2019. According to Hooley, Saunders, and Piercy, (2004), 'the development of a marketing strategy can be developed into following three steps: the establishment of a core strategy, the development of the company’s competitive positioning and the implementation of the marketing strategy.' Hence in my plan, I will follow this guideline and all the key techniques that I had learned from BUS501 and MRT501 to identify the marketing objectives and focus on executing them.

In order to answer the research question, I am going to collect both quantitative and qualitative data by using primary and secondary sources. In this marketing research, I will use a structured interview with marketing manager of Indochina Junk to figure out the company’s current position, and its marketing strategies. The questionnaire will be concisely listed and focus on asking the subject matter as well as the permission to access some of the company’s data. In the other hand, I will also send out a new form of feedback survey for the customers of the company after discussing with the case company. From that, I will sum up 50 feedbacks and interpret this information into primary data which is possible to analyse and assure the private information will be protected and censored. The result will show the need of customer through categorizing different groups of them.

After coding the gathered data, I will apply couple of the analytical techniques to help me understand more about case company’s situation:

*SWOT: Strength – Weakness – Opportunity – Threats (internal environment analyse)

*STEEPLE analysis – Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political, Legal, Ethical (external environment analyses)

* Competitive analyse

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+ Market share graph

+ Sample SWOTs of competitor

* The choice of strategic marketing plan: Through identifying the target market, I suggest a marketing mix strategy to address the need of each segmentation

+ 7P marketing mix

+ Pricing strategy

+ Portfolio analysis

With the outputs of these analytical techniques, I will structure the implementation of Indochina Junk’s marketing plan along with financial prediction in 4 main parts: Information marketing, theme marketing, precision marketing, and branding.

The limitation of this study is about the questionnaire feedback. 50 customers will be asked to fill in during the short term of time. The data will have a similar result trigger by the same group of customers take part in this survey. Another limitation is the case company's data accessibility, here are some confidential information which the company could not provide to me hence there are some bias idea might be showed.

In the description above, I am bringing my interest subject and my willing to research this topic in order to contribute to my work. I desire to conduct this marketing plan properly and full of applicability.

A several literature research about marketing, hospitality marketing, research methods for business will be used in my paper for supporting purpose. Most of these scholar papers I found in blackboard website, library books of Stamford international university and credible online sources:

1. Armstrong, G. & Kotler, P. 2011, Marketing and Introduction, Pearson, 10th Edition, 2011.
2. Guo, Rong 2012. Email message, received. Re: the documents for tourism marketing strategy plan organized in international tourism industry. Forwarded by Qin.
3. Kotler, P & Keller, K L. 2009. Marketing Management. 13th Edition. Pearson Education Ltd., London.
4. Karel J. Alsem. 2007. Strategy Marketing. University of Croningen.
5. Aaker, David A. & Kumar, V. & Day, George S. 2006. Marketing Research. 9th Edition. New York. John Wiley & Sons Inc. Hoboken.
6. Armstrong, G. &Kotler, P. 2011. Marketing and Introduction, Pearson, 10th Edition,
7. Keller, K. 2008. Strategic brand management. Harlow: Pearson International Limited.
8. Kotler, P. 2000. Marketing management.10th edition. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
9. Middleton, Victor T.C. & Clarke, Jackie 2001. Marketing Travel and Tourism. Third Edition. Great Britain. MPG Books Ltd.
10. Li, Yi. 2010. Tourism Marketing Management. Third Edition. Peking. RenMin Newspaper Inc.
11. Merriam, Sharan B. 2008. Qualitative research: a guide to design and implementation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Print.
12. Lambin, J. & Chumpitaz, R. 2007. Market-driven management: strategic and operational marketing. 2nd Edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
13. Hooley, G. J., Saunders, J. A. & Piercy, N. 2004. Marketing strategy and competitive positioning. Third Edition. Harlow, England: Prentice Hall Financial times Indochina Junk official website: https://www.indochina-junk.com/