Effective Note-Taking Strategies for Marketing Case Studies

hey you've got two hours for this and one of the things you're going to do is produce your two sides of notes ready

for the next day and you're also going to annotate the cas study I'm going to start off by talking about the notes you

should have H you should have some sort of template that you can use to put information into your notes even before

the two hours begin because you should should be doing it in lesson or you can do it at home as well so you can see

this person here from a previous year on her first side of notes she's put what the name of the report going to be she's

put all the headings that need to go into the report she's also been she's also

included like what exactly does she need to include within her intro like for objective she's given herself a reminder

it's eight marks she needs to do two or three paragraphs there need to be three smart objectives these are just little

instructions that she's including to remind herself about what goes in each section you see in this justification

she said she needs to do a SWAT on pestal okay okay that's one of the things you can do in your two sides of

notes put the headings in and what you need to write in those headings now the next thing definitions we know from The

Mark scheme that they want to see marketing terminology they mention it over and over again they want to see you

using the marketing terminology that you've learned in lessons now some of you might be worried that you're not

going to remember so for instance if I go into here and this is currently on digital marketing this is the marketing

mix if you don't know what some of these are then write the definitions in your two sides of notes

alternatively actually annotate it onto your paper copy all right so any definitions you don't know for instance

in one of my classes I asked them what were the different pricing strategies and a lot of people couldn't remember

the names of the pricing strategies or and what they meant so you can actually write this in your two sides of notes

any definitions I would definitely have a look at this okay especially when it

comes to promotion also people a lot of people didn't know what public relations were or what we meant by direct

marketing or personal selling you need to know what those are if you feel like you're going to forget what they are

then make sure you write definitions in your two sides of notes or on your annotated case study also they love the

word demanding here if you start using phrases like anticipate demand recognize demand stimulate satisfy the examiner is

going to love it in order to use it properly though you must know what they are so if you need to write those

definitions do it okay what what else can you do well the next thing you can do is you can do part of your swaps so

when we look at Swap what we're trying to do is look at the strengths of the business the weaknesses of the business

what opportunities are there that they can take advantage of and what are the threats now in that two hours you cannot

do the strengths and weaknesses of the business and the reason you can't do that in the two hours is because the

only information they tell you about the business is on this page here the only thing you know is they called decal gear

they produce and sell sportsware and they want to increase Revenue that is not enough to say what the strengths are

and the weaknesses are but what you can do in your two hours is actually start writing down what are the opportunities

and what are the threats for your business all right so if I'm just doing this very quickly I'm just looking into

this case study we can see that sportswar market is due to grow by 21% according to this Source in 2023 it was

due to grow by 21% that is clearly an opportunity for a business that sells Sports whereare it gives an opportunity

to tap into this growing market and potentially sell more and therefore increase their revenue that's what they

want to do remember they want to increase their revenue I'm going to keep re revisiting this

aim okay and it also tells us that they high is likely to be higher higher than other areas of retail what I'm going to

do to begin with is I'm just going to go through and just put an S next to any strength U sorry an O next to any

opportunities um I'm going to put uh a t next to any threats okay or I might even right threat so the fact that JD had 6.1

billion worldwide Revenue in sports I direct to 3.9 billion um that is a threat businesses that have make that

much revenue are a threat because they've got more money to spend on marketing and consequently more

opportunity to increase their revenue because they can bring out more types of clothing they can get cheaper deals with

suppliers so that's a threat to me so I'm going to start identifying the strengths sorry the opportunities and

the threats in my two hours remember I can't do the um I can't do the shrimps and weaknesses because I don't know

enough about the business I'm just highlighting this one because this is an opportunity with more and more

businesses developing Sports where uh that is sustainable that's a potential Market that can be tapped into for this

business now the next thing you can do in here is you can do your pestl now again if you think that you are going to

forget what is meant by pestl then make sure you write down in your in your notes what pestor means so we know most

people know the acronym NOW political economic social technological environmental and ethical go as one

they've missed out legally they've combined it with political all right so which what we're trying to look for now

as part in your part A is are there any political Trends are there any social economic Etc now with my classes what I

get them to do is I go through sentence by sentence and they want to pick out whether it's some sort of Trend so down

here just very quickly we can see that there's more there's been an increase in spending on

sportsware that is an economic Trend so I might just put Eco next to it or economic so you don't think it's sort of

Eco in terms of environmentally friendly also looking AC looking down here 55 pe% of people are using the internet to make

purchases of clothes shoes and Associated items it's probably more than that now that is a technological Trend

and I'm going to go through like this anything to do with government so government were the ones that play put

lockdown in place that is a political Trend and I'm looking through and just identifying political economic social

Etc and what I'm what I might actually start doing is in my two hours I might actually start writing it up I might

start saying political covid-19 and explaining how covid-19 has affected this business in a positive and or could

affect this business in a positive or negative way there'll be another video on pestor later so that's one of the

other things identify the pestal factors you can do that within your two hours now the other thing you can do is

actually what we know I'll just get rid of this what we know from The Mark scheme if you just bear with me here it

is so what we understand from The Mark scheme down here is that they want you to

be able to interpret the reliability and validity of the research that you're given now this is all research the big

old part A loads of pages okay and from that they want you to use data as they want you to identify analyze and use

data but they also want you to identify reliability and validity all right and have a strong understanding of

it so the other thing you can do as part of your part a is when you're looking through this data

and there's any sources that you'll given like global data if you don't know who they are look them up and and little

and start making comments on whether they're reliable or valid if they're giving you data that is years and years

out of date then clearly it's no longer um you can't really make a reliable judgment from that data anymore you're

looking for dates and you're looking for types of data we use statist a lot in l we know they are reliable source so I

don't need to worry about that too much in general um one of the things you can

look at straight away I tell my classes to look at straight away is look at the market research report we can see that

decree surveyed 100 people in a city center aged 17 to35 that 17 to35 has given us a hint already about the market

that deel are looking into or potentially selling to and they were trying to Target 17 or 35 who average

twice a week or more now straight away if I'm talking about reliability and validity I'm going to say that that

sample size of 100 is not enough for them to have to get reliable results 100 is not enough people to judge business

decisions on so straight away I'm going to say the sample size should have been higher I'm also going to look at when

they did it they did it on a Saturday so most people are off work so I'm going to comment that Saturday would

is a good time to do this kind of research because most people are off at work and they did it in a city center so

they're going to get quite a mix what I could suggest is actually perhaps they should have gone to outside gyms and

then you know it would have been better use of their time and they would have got more of those people that exercise

twice a week or more the other thing I might do is have a look at some of these questions what

and I'd probably do this when I'm at home when I've got the case study in front of me and and think have they

asked the right kind of questions could they have drilled down a bit more so SE age 17 to 35 but have they asked people

their age no they haven't there's no question about their age so how do they how do they know that 17y olds aren't

into a particular type of sportsware compared to 35y olds I might suggest going forward that they should have have

broken down some of these questions a bit more but be specific when you do that so reliability and validity that's

that one I mean remember it's not just of the own res their research that they they did you also got to look at the

research that they're quoting so they talked about a market analyst called Kaya Archie now she is a qualified

marketing analyst we deemed she her to be a reliable source but we did notice when we looked to up that she also

writes blogs now if they're talking about blogs on Twitter and all this kind of thing you got to be very careful is

the person a reliable source are they qualified to do it and that will give you some more idea about what to write

for reli reliability and validity now the next thing details of costs and timings so if we go right to the end of

this part A they say stly influencers typically cost £110 per post and they typically generate between 3,000 and

5,000 new followers per month all right now we know that that is going to vary wildly but that's the only bit of

information you're given now whether you do it in the exam or whether you go home and do it and annotate it on the sheet

find out more and we'll see that just as set so you can see here I've just searched for the cost of influencers UK

and this website comes up and you can see the cost varies massively you could get micro influencers who have 10 to

50,000 followers and they will charge this much per post you got Mega influencers um that charging this much

for a post but they've got up to a million followers now that's important information what I would do is I would

make sure I either write it down in my notes or annotate it on here either at home or in the two hours again looking

at this next bit Tik Tok ads great it tells us about who uses Tik Tok in terms of the age ranges but does it tell us

how much it costs for an to put an ad on Tik Tok no it doesn't so part of your two hours or part of when you get home

just write that information on there okay anything on here uh YouTube again it

tells us about YouTube says we can set a daily budget of6 P does it tell us what six pound give us it doesn't so you

could spend part of your analysis finding out what does six pound get you what does1 pound get you as a business

anything you see on here that you don't think they've given now um like of often what people forget to

do in their budget is say how much things cost to produce so you see here video production I mean I'll talk more

about this in a different section but video production £500 to 10,000 so if you're if you as part of

your campaign you say you're going to get an influencer to make a post you've also got to take into account there

might be some production cost involved it just depends if it's just the influencer filming themselves with

holding the product up then obviously there isn't that much cost it'll be on the lower side if it is on a set

somewhere then obviously there might be some extra cost involved but any cost on here and any timings like typically how

long does it take to produce a video or produce a TV advert if TV adverts are on there you can see on here they haven't

even mentioned TV adverts on here and how much they cost so you might want to write that in um some people what they

look for is the average salary in the UK as well average salary why would you want to know that well when you do your

marketing mix and you write about people if you're talking about perhaps recruiting uh people in customer service

you you might say they need someone else in customer service that deals specifically on the side of advising

customers in a certain way um for instance advising people about all the specialist features of the product or

service then you might actually say they should hire a customer service advisor we can see here they cost 20 around

27,000 is the average salary in the UK so you might want to put that average salary figure in and the examiner wants

to know where you got your information from you don't have to give the whole Source in this case you would just write

read in Brackets okay again you can just add that annotate it on there another thing that people have looked at in the

past is the cost to produce a website okay or cost to maintain a website or get someone to improve your

website again they haven't given us that information here you might say that's one of the things they need to spend

their money on in the physical side of the 7 PS spend money on uh improving their

website well if you don't know how much it costs you can't budget for it so that's another thing you can do the next

bit analyzing the trends in the case study I haven't even talked about one of the most important things that you have

to do in this two hours I'm going to go back to this we know they produce and sell sportsware we know they want to

increase revenue and what we've got to do now is we've got to analyze this case study as as much as possible to see as

certain things about the market so this will help you with this we'll make sure this is on the Google classroom but

these kind of questions what are they selling what kind of customers are buying it in terms of

target market age gender income interests or location all that kind of thing like what kind of prices are being

charged at the moment how large is the market is the market growing like what are the different segments in the market

uh how fast is it growing so we saw that in the decrea one they talked about it's it's going to be growing faster than any

other area of retail and the 21% growth in in 2023 all of this information is important okay who are the leaders at

the moment what what advantages do they have well one of JD or JJ or the other one they mentioned they had revenue of

6.9 billion I mean quite clearly they've got huge advantages when it comes to marketing and product development over

smaller businesses all of this kind of information is important now this brings

me on to the next bit so by the way sorry you're going through the this line by line seeing like for instance even

this table we can see that running is the most popular running and fitness are the most popular types of sports or were

in the UK in 2020 why is that important well your business selles sportsware and they want to increase Revenue could this

help you later on when you write the product in the 7even PS about what kind of products they should be focusing on

selling all right and then later on down here you you have various things men's sportsware grew by 18% women's was up by

43% this is important to know because you are going to use this evidence to make recommendations for your business

and you are going to use these statistics if you're going for the top marks when you do the the full case

study the three-hour one then you are going to be using some of these statistics so it's important to know

this information about the market what are the different trends like we seeing here that people are getting designers

on board we can see like technology like 3D printing that's a new thing

sustainability is coming out all that kind of thing all right uh even like marketing messages down here we' got

marketing messages based on diversity like boxers wearing her jobs and sports people with disabilities and

up here um marketing messages over lockdown Jim shark changed their name on Twitter to home Shar to remind everyone

stay at home because they're trying to build relationships trying to to demonstrate themselves to be a caring

business that's their marketing message which brings me on to the next thing part of what you're going to have to do

when you write in your three hours when you write your two reports and I say to do it in the introduction is you're

going to have to come up with a marketing message some sort of uh feeling that you want customers to feel

about what about this business about decre sports what do you want customers to feel about the brand what do you want

decre project about themselves and it can't you can't just make it up what you want to do is look at what others are

doing what is what others are doing why are they doing what is selling so for instance I might in this two hours I

might actually start saying look I'm going to make my marketing message about sustainability and the reason I'm going

to do that is because I have to explain why okay it should be based on target market um and information in the case

study or any external Trend but you do have to say why you're choosing this Mar uh marketing message and the reason I'm

going to choose sustainability for instance doesn't have to be is because other brands are doing it like bam and

Contour as it says here and therefore in order to um keep up with the trends in the market you want to make sure you're

giving customers what they want is it what they want well I'm going to have a look down here and I can see that out of

only the 100 that were asked 30 six ticked environmental factors as one of the issues that is important to them

when they're purchasing that brand so I'm going to include that in my explanation of my marketing message as

well because I'm going to say that's over a third over a third I know they selected

other things as well but over a third selected environmental factors I in that two hours I can actually start writing

that marketing message in my two sides of notes or just annotate it on here here make sure you bring it in the next

day we just talking about marketing message there one thing I forgot to mention is the other thing you can say

is once you've chosen a marketing message and you've said why based on the data and on the target market Etc you

can also try and Link it to how you think that marketing message will help them to achieve their aim their overall

aim which of course was to increase Revenue this is all during part A and in in Part B you can add to it as much as

you want