Marketing Assignment: Strategic Management of Foodbank during COVID-19

Question

Task: Write a marketing assignment critically analysing the challenges encounter during COVID-19 by an organisation of your choice and recommend some marketing strategies to cope up with the situation.

Answer

1. Background of the marketing assignment
Foodbank Australia is usually a non-profit food relief agency that tends to provide food to various schools and charities in need (McKay, 2020). It is usually seen that the organisation usually identified the requirement of more volunteers for functioning effectively. The target market of the organisation generally includes the younger generations that would usually help the organisation to increase its volunteers in the current pandemic situation of COVID-19. Therefore, Foodbank can opt for the research related marketing strategies that usually help in motivating the consumers for volunteers. The positioning statement of the brand includes an appeal to the younger generation and the curious individuals to join the organisation, which is usually the largest food relief agency in Australia. Thus, the positioning statement of the organisation simply states that by increasing its volunteers the organisation will be able to supply food for every household in the current pandemic situation that will help in making a difference in the future of theorganisation.

2. Promotional Mix
2.1 Development of Integrated Marketing Communication Campaign
It is known that for development of an integrated marketing communication plan it is first important to identify the organisation's customers, set clear goals and objectives as well as it is vital to measure the success (Feinman, 2018). Therefore, an integrated marketing campaign generally combines various channels or mediums that include email, display advertising, content as well as social media for promoting a consistent message to a particular audience.

Identification of the organisational customer
Foodbank Australia is usually a non-profit food relief agency that aims to expand its volunteers for functioning more effectively and helping more people in the current crisis of the corona virus. Therefore, as it is a non-profit organisation the customers here tend to be the volunteers that would further help the organisation to distribute food and support more people all over Australia(Nuttman, Patrick and Townsend, 2020). The younger generation is recognised as the potential volunteers for the organisation as they usuallymake the marketing part simpler and easier for an organisation. Therefore, the organisation should focus on marketing strategies that would target the young generation for the expansion of its market.

Setting clear organisational objectives
It is significant for Foodbank to set clear objectives that would be understood by individuals during its marketing campaigns for drawing more volunteers, who would further help the organisation to expand its operation. Therefore, setting clear objectives usually help the company to draw more consumers as well as gain further volunteers that would promote brand awareness. Thus, the company's vision to supply food for every household in Australia should be conveyed to draw more volunteers.

Measuring Success
Foodbank needs to decide which the key performance indicators are for the company before launching its campaign (Badawyet al., 2016). Therefore, it is apparent that implementing tracking software is important to identify the key performance indicators of the company. Thus, measuring success is vital for the development of an integrated marketing campaign for a company.

2.2 Description of the promotional tools and which promotional tools should be used by the company
For the development of the integrated marketing campaign of the company, the promotional tools that include Advertising, direct and digital marketing and public relations can be used by Foodbank.

Advertising as a promotional tool:
It is a known fact that advertising is usually a significant promotional tool that tends to offer a controlled and planned message. Therefore, it can generally contact various people as well as helps them to get influence simultaneously, quickly and usually at a reduced cost (Juska, 2017). Foodbank can implement this promotional tool for conveying the objectives of the organisation that will in turn help the company draw numerous volunteers for supporting the food needs of the Australian needy households. Development of advertising contains five Ms Mission, Cash, Message, Media and Measurement. The purpose is to implement promotional goals. Informing, persuading, remembering and strengthening could be the goal. The target must follow the company's marketing plan. Money or budget ads should recognize the stage of product life, market and consumer base, competition, the intensity of advertising, and product replacement. The further development of the message is divided into two stages: message creation, message evaluation and selection, message implementation and analysis of social responsibility (Bruhn and Schnebelen, 2017). After the message is decided, that next step includes involving media for delivering the message. The access to media tends to differ, as there are various forms of media including television, newspaper, radio, magazine, direct mail as well as the internet. Therefore, adverting is an important promotional tool that Foodbank can implement for conveying its objectives to the younger generations, recognized as the target market of the organisation and therefore, advertising is a cost-effective promotional tool that will help to cater more volunteers for the company.

Public relations as a promotional tool:
Organisations cannot exist alone and must communicate with clients, workers and various stakeholders continuously. The public relations office supports this partnership. The main role of the public relations office consists in handling press communications, encouraging ads for goods, developing and maintaining an overall picture of the business, dealing with regulations and handling public concerns (Naumovska and Blazeska, 2016).Therefore, the direct responsibility for marketing public relations generally includes communicating as well as to relate in the market generally. Furthermore, the tools of public relations generally include social media, business events, sponsorships or partnership as well as it further includes media relations. Moreover, the main aim of the public relation department mainly includes enhancing an organisation's reputation usually. Moreover, the departments assist customers if they usually have any problem with the organisation. Foodbank should maintain effective public relations for enhancing their market reputation as well as further drawing volunteers for their supply of food (McKay, 2020). Therefore, with public relations tools, the organisation can further convey its organisational objectives that will help the organisation to attract young volunteers for supporting their supply of food.

Direct and Digital marketing as a promotional tool:
Direct marketing is called communication through a direct channel without any intermediary. The message or service can be delivered through direct marketing. In recent times, direct marketing has also shown huge growth. In this growth narrative, the internet played a significant role (Key and Czaplewski, 2017). Direct marketing saves a lot of time, creates a personal and enjoyable experience. Direct marketing lowers company costs. Direct mail, catalogue marketing, telemarketing, TV and kiosks are direct marketing media in the face to face marketing usually. Therefore, Foodbank can conduct direct marketing via the internet for drawing more volunteers as it is known that the main target market of the organisation usually includes young individuals. The young individuals tend to be active on the internet and so direct marketing is considered as an important promotional tool for Foodbank for expanding its growth as well as drawing more volunteers

On the other hand, Digital advertising uses social media, phone systems and other electronic devices to promote or sponsor a product or service. The pool of potential consumers found on the web is a far bigger group than the local customers. Organisations are generally able to reach a large public cost-effectively and measurably via digital marketing (Kingsnorth, 2019).Therefore, Foodbank can use the digital market to meet the organisational objectives of drawing further volunteers for assisting the organisation to supply food among the needy household of Australia. Moreover, digital marketing usually tends to use social media and it is evident that in the 21st century almost everyone uses social media especially the young individuals tends to be active in the social media hugely. Thus, Foodbank can use it as an opportunity for promotion of its organisational objectives that will further help in drawing more volunteers for the organisation to attain further growth and development. Moreover, social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook tends to be a huge platform for promotion and Foodbank can use social networking sites for drawing more volunteers and expanding the organisational reputation.

2.3 Strategic recommendations meeting the target market as well as contribute to achieving the company objectives
It is usually evident that Foodbank Australia is generally a non-profit organisation that tends to provide food relief to various schools and charities in needs. The revenue of the organisation for its activities is generally generated from various sources that include suppliers, farmers as well as other individuals (Mukoya, McKay and Dunn, 2017). It is seen that the organisation usually has relation with different sources generally for the acquirement of the food products that the program alone cannot provide completely. Therefore, in the present crisis of the pandemic COVID-19, the organisation aims to increase its services usually for treating the worsening condition of the nation. The organisation usually aims to increase its volunteers for assisting the organisation to increase its services quickly. The promotional tools such as advertising, public relations as well as direct and digital marketing can be adopted by the organisation to fulfil its objective as well as expand its services all over the country in the present crisis of the pandemic(Juska, 2017). The target market of the company usually includes the young individuals generally as it is known that the younger generations usually tend to be enthusiastic and they are generally capable of making a difference for attaining change in the society. Moreover, teenagers are usually very good at socialising that makes them perfect for the role of volunteers. As the organisation tends to gain more volunteers for tackling the enhanced workload during the pandemic, the advertising tool tends to be an effective promotional tool usually for Foodbank. The company for drawing the attention of the young individuals can implement the advertising via newspaper, television as well as banners.

Moreover, maintaining effective public relation is considered an effective promotional tool for the organisation generally (Naumovska and Blazeska, 2016). Maintaining effective relationships with the suppliers of the food relief will help the organisation to further expand its supplies. The digital and direct marketing via social media and directly will further help the organisation draw volunteers.

The organisation will have to spend immense revenue for its promotion and marketing generally. The total revenue for the promotional and advertising events includes AUD 2500. Moreover, the organisation will further raise its posts in social media for connecting with the people.

Table 1: Timeline
(Source: As created by Author)

2.4 Justification of marketing analytics to measure the success of each strategy
Marketing analytics also is known as internet marketing analytics helps to monitor campaigns and the outcomes for effectively investing cost. Therefore, Foodbank should implement the marketing analytics to assess if the budget for advertising, digital and direct marketing is effective and it does not cost more than the output (France and Ghose, 2019). The organisation should begin with keyword research that is usually one of the strongest powerful metrics and it will let the company know the valuable long-term advantage of engaging in natural and paid search marketing. Moreover, the implementation of Adwords performance grader will be helpful for Foodbank to dictate the rank of the organisation in Google and measure its success in each strategy.

3. Conclusion
To conclude, the study of the report usually provides an illustration of the food relief organisation named Foodbank in Australia and analyses the challenges that the organisation usually faces for providing food packages in the pandemic situation usually. The organisation should recognize the younger generation as its target market as the younger generation can make a difference in society. The following report identifies the promotional tools such as advertising, public relations as well as digital and direct marketing that will help the company to generate more volunteers in the situation of the pandemic for supplying food reliefs. The promotional tools will be significant for the company the target market of the organisation generally includes the younger generation and advertising via social media and digital marketing through social media will be helpful to draw the attention of the younger generation as they tend to be active in the social medial and digital platform. Moreover, drawing more volunteers will help the organisation to expand its supplies of food reliefs so the maintenance of public relations is significant for the organisation. The implementation of the promotional tools will help the organisation to derive better outcome as well as to attain their positional statement of eliminating hunger from the country Australia.

References
Badawy, M., Abd El-Aziz, A.A., Idress, A.M., Hefny, H. and Hossam, S., 2016. A survey on exploring key performance indicators. Future Computing and Informatics Journal, 1(1-2), pp.47-52.

Bruhn, M. and Schnebelen, S., 2017. Integrated marketing communication–from an instrumental to a customer-centric perspective. European Journal of Marketing. Feinman, D., 2018. Integrated Marketing Communication Plan. France, S.L. and Ghose, S., 2019. Marketing analytics: Methods, practice, implementation, and links to other fields. Expert Systems with Applications, 119, pp.456-475.

Juska, J.M., 2017. Integrated marketing communication: advertising and promotion in a digital world. Routledge. Key, T.M. and Czaplewski, A.J., 2017. Upstream social marketing strategy: An integrated marketing communications approach. Business Horizons, 60(3), pp.325-333.

Kingsnorth, S., 2019. Digital marketing strategy: an integrated approach to online marketing. Kogan Page Publishers.

McKay, F.H., 2020. 7 Responding to hunger in Australia. Marketing assignmentSustaining Social Inclusion.

Mukoya, M.N., McKay, F.H. and Dunn, M., 2017. Can giving clients a choice in food selection help to meet their nutritional needs?: Investigating a novel food bank approach for asylum seekers. Journal of International Migration and Integration, 18(4), pp.981-991.

Naumovska, L. and Blazeska, D., 2016. Public relation based model of integrated marketing communications. UTMS Journal of Economics, 7(2), pp.175-186.

Nuttman, S., Patrick, R. and Townsend, M., 2020. Addressing food insecurity in Australia through education for sustainability. Health Promotion International.