OCAs IN DETAIL

OCA 1 – Individual

Pick a company (e.g., Sephora, Best Buy, Beyond Meat, Spotify), product category (e.g., makeup, food delivery apps, video conference apps), or a cause (sustainability, consumer education, cancer awareness) that has an interesting marketing problem or opportunity worth researching during COVID-19. You need to be able to collect data on this company/product category/cause by surveying real customers (online).

1. Describe the company/product category/cause and the industry in which it operates. Provide descriptive statistics to paint a picture of what is going (e.g., provide average sales compared to industry sales, growth rate, number of customers or members, competitors in the space, number of product lines, etc.). Discuss how the industry and company has been affected by COVID-19.

a.The key is to bring the numbers to life by telling me what they mean. For example, if Macy’s revenue in 2018 was $25,739 billion, what is this relative to, and what % growth does that represent? How has it changed during COVID-19, and how does this compare to its competitors?

1. Include references from academic journals, trade journals, press releases, popular press articles, business magazines, etc.
2. It is very important to substantiate your claims (i.e., provide evidence). Refrain from using personal opinion or “flashy” sales-pitch-type language. Instead, stick to the facts and provide research-based arguments with evidence.

1. Perform a SWOT analysis of the firm/industry. Think critically about all of the possibilities for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
   1. For each item you include, provide evidence for it. For example, if you say, “Good quality customer service,” provide evidence of that claim with a comparison of the firm’s ratings to its competitors’ ratings.
   2. You can create a bulleted SWOT.
2. Based on the SWOT analysis and what you have told me about the company/product and industry, identify a marketing opportunity/problem that you would like to research (state the problem or opportunity in 1-2 sentences).
3. Assignment length: 2 pages, single-spaced. Submit on Turnitin. Make sure to edit your work to check for grammatical and spelling errors. References can be endnotes or footnotes (any style is fine); you should have several references, not just a few.

• This is the very first time I will get to know you through your work and this assignment is worth more than half a letter grade. Thus, even though the assignment is just 2 pages, you should put considerable effort into generating high quality output with substantial critical thinking.