Rationale and Starting Point

Rationale:

"The world of marketing is changing and developing year on year. Analysing the marketing practices of a brand within a certain industry can give an excellent level of insight into the company’s current position and also suggest a future strategic direction. The use of online blogs and infographics align with current industry expectations around creative marketing campaigns and techniques. Research has identified that traditional dyadic models of communication are continually being questioned by the consumer (Nicholls and Mohsen, 2019)" (Hartpury University, 2022).  Our Task: As a cohort, we were tasked to complete a blog for our Introduction to the Principles of Marketing module.  In this blog we were requested to "undertake an analysis of the marketing environment" (Hartpury University, 2022) of our chosen brand, focusing on an "audit of the organisation, utilising traditional marketing literature and models to showcase the organisations position within the industry" (Hartpury University, 2022) This blog would be used to support the infographic to show our understanding of the methods of analysis and other academic theories used in traditional marketing practices.

Our Starting Point:

When considering which brand we wanted to choose, we reviewed a number of key features; whether or not to choose an equine brand, which brands had good marketing strategies to analyse and whether or not to choose a new or well established brand.  Our choices on these fronts were as follows; a non equine brand which has been recently established.  

Our Choice:

In due course, we decided on Prime Hydration, a brand established in 2022 who use social media to full advantage in their marketing strategy.  We chose Prime because one member of our group had some prior knowledge about the brand and we felt that as they were a new brand we would be able to analyse how they had used marketing strategies in the launch of their products.  In addition, as we all have interests in sport, especially equestrian sports, looking at a sports drink brand linked nicely with our personal interests.  Prime has gone from a concept on paper to a market leader in a very short space of time, providing us with plenty of content to analyse.  

References:

Module specification (2022) HSPV5S-15-4 - Introduction to the Principles of Marketing. Available at: https://unidocs.hartpury.ac.uk/document-library/module-specifications/hspv5s-15-4-introduction-to-the-principles-of-marketing/?keywords=introduction%2Bto%2Bthe%2Bprinciples%2Bof%2Bmarketing (Accessed: March 15, 2023). 

 (Catriona Veal)