MBA 640: Innovation Through Marketing and Technology

For project 4, you are being asked to develop a marketing plan to increase Siemens Healthineers' sales in the United States.

The tips below give suggestions for finding useful information for some of the components of project 4.

For information about Siemens Healthineers and the conditions under which it's currently operating, the following resources should be helpful:

• Finding Company Information
• Conducting Market Research
• Finding or Creating SWOT Analyses
• Finding Industry Overviews
  • In addition to researching Siemens Healthineers itself, it will also help to research the industries that it's part of. Note that different databases may show different primary NAICS codes for the company, which is fine, as it just reflects differing opinions about what the primary business activity of the company is. For example, Hoovers lists Siemens Healthineers' primary NAICS code as 339112, which is the code for surgical and medical equipment manufacturing, while Gale Business: Insights lists the company's primary NAICS code as 334510, which is the code for electromedical and electrotherapeutic apparatus manufacturing. Using these NAICS codes for your industry research will help you understand the business environment in which Siemens Healthineers is operating.

For information about the target market for Siemens Healthineers' products, in Business Source Ultimate and/or ABI/INFORM Collection, run searches such as:

"siemens healthineers" AND ("target market*" OR "market research")

(ultrasound OR sonograph*) AND ("target market*" OR "market research")

Keep in mind that information found regarding Siemens Healthineers' strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) can help you understand what to include in a positioning statement, value proposition, and discussion of the company's product differentiation.

You may also find useful information about Siemens Healthineers on the company's own website.

It'll be up to you to decide, based on what you've read for your class and on the research that you've conducted for this project, which marketing activities, channels, tools, and resources will best help you implement your marketing strategy and achieve your objectives. For more information about implementing marketing strategies, though, resources such as the following may be helpful:

• The Authority Guide to writing and implementing a marketing plan: A step-by-step manual to make you a smarter marketer and maximise your business profits
• Developing successful marketing strategies
• Malcolm McDonald on marketing planning: Understanding marketing plans and strategy
• Marketing 5.0
• The marketing plan: How to prepare and implement it
• The marketing plan handbook: Develop big-picture marketing plans for pennies on the dollar
• Market your way to growth: 8 ways to win
• Successful marketing plans in a week

Some of the resources mentioned in the previous section ("Tactics and Action Plan") may help you estimate the costs and revenues associated with implementing your chosen marketing plan and also help you with a return on investment (ROI) analysis.

For general information about business finance, including information about conducting a break-even analysis, the following resources may be helpful:

• "Break-even analysis"
• The essentials of finance and accounting for nonfinancial managers
• Financial management: A practical and accessible introduction for students and entrepreneurs (Rev. ed.)
• How to understand business finance

Some of the resources mentioned in the "Tactics and Action Plan" section -- for example, the "Financial structure and controls" chapter of Developing successful marketing strategies -- may help you determine a set of appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs), metrics, and feedback mechanisms that will allow you to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of your chosen marketing plan. For additional information about how to assess the effectiveness/efficiency of marketing plans, some of the following resources may be helpful:

• Data-first marketing
• Digital marketing analytics: Making sense of consumer data in a digital world (2nd ed.)
• "Conceptual models on the effectiveness of e-marketing strategies in engaging consumers"
• "Navigating new marketing technologies, channels and metrics"

Whether you're searching in UMGC Library databases or on the free Web, your search results may sometimes include mentions of market reports or data compilations from market research firms such as Forrester Research, Frost & Sullivan, the Gartner Group, etc. Such reports are generally quite expensive; many cost anywhere from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars apiece.

That being the case, the full text of such reports are not generally available in any library research database, and the UMGC Library may not be able to obtain the full-text reports for you via our DocumentExpress interlibrary loan service.

But press releases and other documents that discuss these reports -- documents that are often available from UMGC Library databases and/or posted on the free Web -- may be useful for your research since such documents often summarize key findings from the reports.

If you need additional assistance with finding information for project 4, please Ask a Librarian; if you have questions about the requirements for the assignment, please contact your instructor.