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Marketing Plan
| Introduction: My class and I were approached with a request for help from Martin Fletcher Maidenheads town manager, who asked if we could help him research and show the reasons why Maidenhead is considered as the second town in the county and what the town could collectively do to increase peoples opinion of the town, in order to encourage people to use the town more often and to improve peoples knowledge of services offered in the town and the advantages to using the town! We accepted his offer with open arms as we thought that it would be an interesting project, and that as it is most of our local town it could be interesting to see whether any of our recommendations are implemented in to the town in the near future, we also thought that it would be a good piece of course work as it is not the usual project so we would be presented with new problems that we have never come across before giving us a chance to show our problem solving skills. It also gives us more than enough to show and implement our business skills that we have been studying for the last four years! Aims and objectives: In my project marketing Maidenhead there are many areas of business that I will look in to, to help my research, collate and present the data. I will also have to include certain key points that illustrate the problems involved with Maidenhead and actual marketing the town; I have listed some of these criteria’s below! · What are the marketing needs of Maidenhead · What marketing program will I recommend to be introduced for the town? · What marketing strategy and plan I will recommend to be implemented in the town. · To provide details of all of the operational requirements in order to effect this program · What human resources are required to implement this project? · What financial resources are required to implement this project? · Any legal, council or planning restraints involved in implementing this project. To ultimately know if this project is a success I will have to wait until February to see if Maidenhead town council accepts my classmate’s projects and mine, and whether or not any recommendations are implemented in the town! All that I can comment about at this point is that Martin Fletcher, Maidenhead’s town councillor is very pleased with the work that the class has done as a whole so far! Background: Marketing Maidenhead is the title of my business course work, although the title is slightly self explanatory I will explain it in a little more depth. Martin Fletcher who is the Maidenhead town manager approached myself self and my business studies class and asked if we could help him determine the reason that Maidenhead is perceived as the second town in the county, as a class we decided that this would be a perfect project that we could for our Yr 13 course work module, as it is not a usual choice of project and is also an interesting idea that has got many different possibility so we would not have to worry about having 7 identical projects when we have finished them all. Once we have finished all of the projects they will get presented to the Maidenhead town council with all of our recommendations on what Maidenhead could do to improve people’s view of the town and the services provided in the town. Maidenhead is my local town it is in the county of Berkshire, also in this county is Windsor and Slough witch are commonly perceived as better places to spend some time shopping or even socialising! So in this project I will try to find out why people have this opinion of Maidenhead and what Maidenhead could do to change people’s opinion of the town, I will also try to find out what it is that people do not like about the town and once I have determined this I will try to think of some ideas of what the town could do, with relevance, to make people no longer look at Maidenhead as the second or third town in the county. I am doing this project in conjunction with the majority of my business class as this will make collecting research easier and less time consuming, it will also help the final result as there will be 6 different sets of recommendations at the end of the project to present to the Maidenhead town council. Here is some information that I found on Maidenhead on the Internet, and then abbreviated in to my own words as to get rid of all of the non-relevant data. Map of the British Isles, showing Maidenhead Maidenhead is in the county of Berkshire and about 25 miles (40 kilometres) west of London. Maidenhead is just off the M4 and is close to the M40, it is also situated on a main line that goes all the way to London Paddington and is on the same line as Slough and Reading, with many many other stops on the line making it easy to access this has made the town and the surrounding areas with people who want to commute to London to work. Maidenhead is also perceived as a nice place to live with a low rate of crime and a large choice of local schools that all regularly perform well in the nation league tables. Maidenhead is situated on the River Thames, although the town is on the river the main shopping centre which is all located around Queen street and the Nicholson’s Centre is around ½ a mile form the river it’s self with only one small parade close to the river with only a couple of shops, including couple of restaurants and a Dominos Pizza and a convenience store, this are has not been taken full advantage of. Research method: In this project we instantly decided that we had to go out to do some primary research to initially show peoples thoughts on the town, for example what they do not like about the town and what they do and do not know about what Maidenhead has to offer people visiting the town! The class as a whole sat down to create a questionnaire to be circulated around shoppers in Maidenhead and shopkeepers. When we started thinking of questions for the questionnaire it became obvious that we did not know any of the problems involve d in the town so we arranged a meeting with Martin Fletcher to see what he had to say about what he wanted us to find out and any specific areas that he wanted looking at with relevance to the town centre. Listed below are some points that were brought up in the brief meeting that we had. · Shopping on Sunday’s · Car parking in and around the town. · Why people visit the town. · What people think of the town. · Safety in the town. After the meeting we had a more clear idea on what we wanted to find out using the survey, so at this point we started to create the questionnaire with questions relating to the pacific arrears that Martin Fletcher highlighted in the meeting! On the questionnaire we asked a broad range of questions, but still tried not to invade privacy and we also tried to ask questions that people would not mind answering and could see that it was all relevant information that had obvious uses, another thing that we had to ensure was that the questionnaire was not to long and time consuming as not to put people off from filling the questionnaire out! Once we had decided what the questions were going to be we collectively set about constructing the questionnaire in the most user friendly and aesthetically pleasing way possible. We did this by dividing the questionnaire in to three main sections the first being a tick box section with a series of questions relating to the subject age, gender, reason for visiting the town, how frequently the subject visits the town, the duration of their visit, how they got to the town and if they travel by car where exactly they had parked their car. The second section was a set of tick boxes designed to show a quality of scale for the next section of questions witch covered the following topic areas. · The quality of service in Maidenhead's shops · The range of goods available in the town · Car Parks in Maidenhead · Public transport to/from the town · Town centre environment (paving, seating etc.) · Safety/security in the town (You can see a finished copy of the questionnaire in the appendices at the end of the project) After constructing the questionnaire we decided that we would all go in to Maidenhead to distribute the questionnaire around. We collectively decided that it would provide the optimum results if we set up three different research points around the town centre we ultimately decided on one table in the Nicholson’s centre which it the only under cover shopping area in the town, we also set a table up in the entrance to sainsburys witch is located on the edge of the whole shopping area, another was set up in the lobby area of the Marks and Spencer’s outlet, although we set up these stations within the town we felt that we had to increase the sample size and we also wanted to try to get the opinions of different people and the opinions of people who do not use Maidenhead regularly so we distributed the survey between members of our sixth form and between teachers at the school, after this we distributed a set of questionnaires to a small pub called the bumble bee in white Waltham witch is a ten minuet from Maidenhead town centre. We also thought that it would be useful to have the views and opinions of the shopkeeper of Maidenhead town centre, as these are the people who will ultimately be benefiting form this project! In our research we also set up a second meeting with Martin Fletcher witch by the end had resembled an interview more than a meeting with many interesting points arose along with more information about the town came to light that had not previously been known to the group. This interview was made more relevant and more useful as the project as a hole as we had already collected the results from the questionnaire, and we had started to collate and evaluate the results to look at what we could see form them. As we had this information we were able to ask relevant and useful questions witch aided the progression of the analysis of the results. Over the entire interview was a good source of secondary data. Analyses of Results: The graph below shows the different age groups that we surveyed and the total number of people that we surveyed, at this point the only thing that I can comment on is that I would have like a more even spread of the different age groups as there is a difference of 22 people between two different sample ranges! [IMAGE] This pie chart shows the correlation between the amount of male and females surveyed in the Maidenhead town shopper’s survey! The only thing to comment on is that there were over one and a half more women surveyed than men, this may be due to the fact you would expect to see more females in the town centre, it may also be due to the fact that females may be more willing to fill in a survey! [IMAGE] This next Pie chart show the main reason for people to visit the town the sections are labelled with a percentage that represents the amount of people who selected this genre on the survey. Looking at the pie chart it becomes instantly obvious that the main reason for people to visit the town is for shopping, and the second most common reason for visiting the town is social and recreational uses, this information is very useful as it shows us that the majority of the towns visitors are there to shop and to socialise, this left only a remanding 9% of people in the categories of business and other. This is useful as I can now comment on what people visit the town for and I can also target these groups of people specifically as to increase the overall amount of people coming in to the town centre.[IMAGE]One way of increasing the use of Maidenhead town centre would be to encourage the people who already use the town centre to use it more frequently; this is the main use of the bar chart below as it illustrates the regularity of people visiting the town centre. [IMAGE]Graph below shows the amount of time that people stay in the town centre for. Looking at the graph you can see that the majority of people stay in town centre for two to four hours, thee majority of the other people surveyed staid in the town centre for less than 2 hours, and with a small minority staying in the town for more than 4 hours, and looking at the table you can see a very small amount of people stay in the town centre for over six hours with only 3 people. [IMAGE] The graph below illustrates the form of transport that the people that we surveyed used to access the town. A large majority of people use a car to access the town, and very few use the public transport links. I will look at way to encourage people to use the transport links as Maidenhead has a comprehensive bus service that provides cover to the majority of the local area.[IMAGE]The graph below show you where people visiting the town have parked, the graph suggests that the majority of people either park in the Nicholson’s centre car park of the Sainsbury car park, I think that this set of results are misleading, this is as the surveys were handed out outside sainsburys and in the Nicholson’s centre this would make it much more likely to survey people who parked in these location the third point where the surveys was in the lobby of Marks and Spencer’s there is no specific car park for the shop so a locations like this would have been better for collecting results as the do not encourage misleading results, looking at the graph you could say that people do no use the heins meadow car park is not used very much, there is also a large number of people going in to the town who are parking on the street or in private parking areas. [IMAGE]The table below shows the score’s that people gave to the questions on the questionnaire. The figures were gained by asking the question and asking for the response in the form of a tick in one of the boxes marked excellent, good, average, poor, v-poor after collecting in all of the surveys we gave each category a value very poor being 1 and excellent being 5. After doing this I added together the value given for each question, I divided this figure by the amount of people that answered the question. This gave an average answer for each question. Ave Q OF S Quality of service in Maidenhead's shops 3.23 3.38 3.3 2.85 3.08 3.04 3.54 3.20 The range of goods available in the town 2.91 3.1 2.84 2.75 2.91 3 2.63 2.88 Car Parks in Maidenhead 3.29 3.33 3.72 3.28 2.65 2.83 3.27 3.20 Public transport to/from the town 2.58 2.76 3.12 1.66 2.04 2.95 3.72 2.69 Town centre environment 3.47 3.57 2.84 2.71 2.73 2.95 3.45 3.10 Safety/security in the town 3.58 3.14 3.38 2.71 2.75 2.86 3.81 3.18 The quality of service in Maidenhead's shops had an average score of 3.2 witch is just over three which puts it just above average, this means that this is an area that could be improved on in Maidenheads shops, although it is average the town should be aiming to get good/excellent in order to live up to the rival town Windsor. People in Maidenhead rated the range of goods in the town 2.88 on average, again this figure is lower than expected, this is an area that need some attention as this figure should defiantly be above 3 at least as people will value the range of goods available as it is effecting the possibility of their being the goods wanted by the consumer! Car parks in Maidenhead got a score of 3.20 putting it just above average although this is not great it is not to low as to get a higher score you would have to build large amounts of modern parking areas, but Maidenhead does not have the funding for projects of this size especially when the parking in Maidenhead is still not used to capacity. Public transport to and form the town exists in the form of a bus network leaving every 30min to most parts of the town and it also links some local villages to the town, the town also has a train station witch is on the main route to London Reading and Slough, this makes me feel that the score of 3.1 is a little harsh as in my personal opinion I feel that the local public transport is very good, I will have to try to understand why people gave it this score when Maidenhead is offering a comprehensive public transport system already. People in the town feel relatively safe giving the town an average score of 3.18 which is good, although it could still be improved as if people do not feel safe they will not come to the town to shop or recreate! Recommendations: *Maidenhead as a town is mainly orientated around retail in the town centre, so to make the town more successful more people will need to be encouraged to either start coming to the town or to come to the town more regularly. As the town is mainly orientated by shops, this means that I would like to recommend to add some diversity in to the town, the town is already host to a cinema a bowling ally and a large selection of bars. Looking around the town centre you can see that there are very few café’s in the main shopping area. Café’s in the shopping area would help bring the town centre environment up and should also help bring up the range of goods available in the town. The sort of cafes that the town would want to encourage/invite are café’s like “Café Nero” which has a café in Reading that is thriving. This style of café which is sleek and modern, with on street tables to give the town a community feel. The town should also send a letter of encouragement to all of the café’s in the high street encouraging them to redevelop, the café fronts and the interior to help modernise the town. They should also encourage them to take use of some of the room on the pedestrianised high street. (At the moment the local council has restrictions on using the street as a place to put tables and chairs, I recommend that the Maidenhead town councillor Martin Fletcher should speak to the council to propose a compromise on the situation for example putting a restriction on how far out in to the street the tables and chares were aloud to protrude) *Another thing that the town is lacking, according to the comments that were left on the bottom of the surveys, is a large department store, for example John Lewis or debonames. Maidenhead does not have a department store already for a couple of main reasons, the first is that the town in the past has been said not to have enough room for a department store and room for all of the parking required. Another reason why the town does not have a large department store is that the town is over shadowed by Windsor the first town in the bough, Windsor has a John Lewis, a Daniels and Wycombe another close town has a very large John Lewis, this shows that the large company’s swarm to the already large thriving towns to open a store and will overlook the slightly smaller town 10 miles down the road as they see it as if some one wants to go to one of there stores they will travel to the town down the road to do so. Maidenhead as a town needs to encourage a department store to come to the town, I propose we do this by doing some of the research for them, in the form of finding a suitable location either for redevelopment or a new sight that could provide adequate space for the store and all of the parking that will be required! There is a large 5 story building in the high street that had sat disused and derelict for the last 5 or six years, this building could provide a perfect location for a department store to open. The only main issue that this would rice is where the parking facility for a department store would be as the current car parks in the town would not be able to cope with the increased volume of the cars! *Maidenhead town centre had around half of the town centre pedestrianised around 5 years ago, although this was adequate then it is starting to fail it’s needs, as the one way system that cuts trough the bottom half of the town centre is over used by cars and is constantly blocked by buses that have stopped at the bus stop. This bit of road is considered as dangerous as there are thin pavements on either side of the road that are not nearly big enough to hold the large quantity of people trying to use them when the town centre is busy! The road that cuts trough the town centre is not essential to have as the bus stop should be relocated to the end of prier’s way, and all of the shops could keep access by the road becoming only a right of passage to the shop keepers and any delivers that need to get trough. This proposal would make the town centre feel like one large shopping area, and it would help the whole town as it would become more apparent to shoppers visiting the town that it is a nice place to come to shop. * One major problem that the town has is that people do not know what is going on in the town and what the town is planning for the future of the town and how the town centre is going to manage in the near future. To over come this problem I propose that a small marketing campaign is launched, for example it would not use up much of the towns limited recourses to produce an information board that could be posted on the occasional lamp post around the town centre, the board could list information about the town, for Example… “DID YOU KNOW THAT MAIDENHEAD IS OPEN THIS SUNDAY” Or “WHY NOT PARK IN PRIERS WAY; IT IS CHEAPER AND MORE CONVENIENT THAN YOU THINK!” I have made a poster to show the potential of the posters and the simplicity (a copy of the poster is available in the appendices at the back of the project), this recommendation would be easy and quick to implement as it is cheap and easy to get running, and although it is cheap I still think that it could prove to be effective at showing what the town has to offer! People need informing on what is good about the town and another good way that this could be done is, in association with the Maidenhead advertiser and the Maidenhead express the Maidenhead town council could submit information about what is new for the town and what the town is planning to do in the future to give people a chance to anticipate the arrival of new features to the town, this would increase the chances of people visiting. Another way to educate people about what is available and what is going on in the town is to get in to contact with the local radio stations “Star FM” and “Swan FM” and producing a series of adverts that tell people what is new to the town and about any events that are coming in the near future, this would help increase foot fall and peoples understanding of the town. *In the survey it became apparent that large numbers of people just did not know that the majority of the shops in the town centre are open on a Sunday, this is a point that need attention to as over 50% of the people that we surveyed did not know that the town was so alive on a Sunday. To let people know that the town is open I recommend that the town does a couple of things. · The first would be to utilise the PA system that is already in place in the niclsons centre, by using it to play recorded messages informing people about the town’s events, for example it could be used to inform people that the town is open on a Sunday. · The second would be to run a series of articles in the two local papers informing people about Sunday shopping, telling them about the opening times and all the advantages of the scheme. *People who answered the survey also all seemed to survey the point that the car parks in Maidenhead as a hole have been left to get run down and that the general opinion is that they could all do with a bit of maintaince and a little modernising. This is true as the niclsons centre car park has not had any work done on the appearance of it since 1985 witch is coming close to 20 years. The issue of ease of use in the car parks has also been raised with numerous people saying how poor the planning on the lay out of the car park was as if you are waiting to get in to a space that some one is reversing out of there is no way for the people behind you to get past this causes a long tail back that is highly inconvenient and discourages people to go this car park this could be resolved by changing the car parking spaces from straight to slightly angled making more room for cars to pas and also making it slightly easier to pull in and out of the spaces, the only down side would be that if the hole car park was re-lined the capacity would be decreased by around 20 to 30 spaces! * Wycombe Windsor Slough Reading Theatre Castle Ice Rink New shopping complex (the oracle) Dry ski slope Utilises River Greater Varity Restaurants Highly pedestrianalised Theatre Superstores Readily available information Superstores; eg... Halfords, B&Q History Large market 3 shopping complexes The graph above shows certain services and facilities that other surrounding towns have that Maidenhead does not have. Maiden head as a town has to look far in to the future and decide what the town wants to be like physically and culturally and put in place some positive steps towards encouraging this goal. For example if the town decides that they want to introduce more culture and diversity in to the town they could look in to the feasibility of an art gallery of a theatre closer to the town centre. Maidenhead as a town has a large amount of either un used or wasted spaces, like the canal that runs trough the bottom end on the town centre, it has become over grown and littered with shopping trolleys and other unsightly items since the hole are got redeveloped 15 years ago and has now been all but forgotten about. This area has got great potential for redevelopment as it could house a few shops and some benches making the hole are aesthetically pleasing. Just next to the canal is the old cinema, this sight used to be a cinema about 25 years ago and was knocked down to be replaced but half way trough the build the project ran out of money so it has been sitting there for the past 25 years, this is a terrible waste of space as this is a large sight wit underground parking already built underneath the old cinema, the sight would be large enough to house a couple of shops and a restaurant. Not all of Maidenhead is in poor condition but parts of it are being redeveloped at the moment, for example the Sainsbury’s is looking to expand there dated store, they are demolishing the entire building and replacing it with a new modern building the will be surrounded by a large shopping piazza with a selection of shops and cafes. Maidenhead has 7% of the building either unused or are unusable due to structural damage and neglect although this is below the national average of 7.5% it is still under utilising the space available in the town and is also another area that the Maidenhead town council should look at and find a way to use the wasted 7% of the town! This is a positive step forwards for the town as they are modernising and looking to the future and the constant development of the town! Conclusion: Below are some key recommendations that in my opinion the town should look to address. · Maidenhead is open for shopping on a Sunday, but only half of the people who shop in the town know this. · As Sainsbury’s is currently being redeveloped Maidenhead town council should ensure that they try to make this whole area feel a part of the town as it is ever so slightly out of the CBD. · Maidenhead has a large river frontage that is under utilised so the town should keep looking at ways to incorporate it in to the town life. · The Nicholson’s centre should start using the already installed PA system to broadcast public service announcements to inform people about the town and its events, this would be run in conjunction with the proposed poster campaign to promote the town and its facilities. · One thing that Maidenhead town does not have is a department store, the town would benefit from one as it would help increase foot fall and would also widely increase the diversity of the products in the town. · Maidenhead should start trying to make appropriate use of the derelict and wasted space that is within the town centre as this is a bad reflection on the town. · It is a common opinion that the car parks in the town are up to the job, except for the fact that they all seem a little run down and are in need of a little lick of paint. · Parts of the town centre were pedestrianised but part of the high street with a high potential was left out, the town should look in to pedestrienising this part of the town. Appendices & Sources: This is a list of all of the websites that I used to obtain information! =========================================================== * www.neighbourhood.statstics.gov.uk * www.maidenhead.com * www.maidenhead.net I also obtained information off of Martin Fletcher in a series of interviews and meetings! There were also large amounts of data obtained when the survey was carried out! Mr Miller was also a useful source of information as he is a shopkeeper in the town centre. | |
| Category: Marketing | Added by: Antonio (15.06.2009) | |
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