On-Site Executive MBA Program - Assignment Example

? of the of the of the Table of Contents: Contents Company Overview: 3 Executive Summary: 3 Target Market: 4 Competition: 5 Our Service: 5 Marketing Budget: 6 Location: 7 Pricing Strategy: 7 Summary and Implementation: 8 References: 11 Grizzell. B. C., Burrell. D. N., (2008), “Competitive Marketing and Planning Strategy in Higher 11 Education”, Academic Leadership Live: The online Journal, Vol. 9 (2), reviewed on October 31, 2011, available at http://www.academicleadership.org/article/competitive-marketing-and-planning-strategy-in-higher-education 11 Company Overview: In this era of advancement, everything just has to be in your grasp. Education defines the existence of human life and to actually progress in this world, you need to take hold of knowledge that is all around you. An online MBA program offers a chance to reach out to the rest of the world and gather all the knowledge that there is in the world. The school would be offering, a lot of courses and a variety of subjects to the students all across the world. These courses would be taught by the world class faculty. The lectures would be delivered online. A learning management system would be introduced for the students through which they’ll be in contact with the faculty. The whole institute would be a virtual facility which would facilitate the process of acquiring knowledge from the very best. We plan to name our institute “MBA with Convenience”. We plan to deliver the best of our efforts combined with the opportunities that bring a smile on the faces of the students. What is more, a reasonable tuitions fee and scholarships programs to facilitate our students in every possible way. The major target market is working class of USA and all other countries around the world. Students who want to come to United States but due to financial issues cannot come to the States. Executive Summary: A growing number of business proficient’s prefer to get their MBAs over the internet. Getting an MBA degree is a big achievement for many students. Countless undergraduates after graduating progress to get their Masters Degree in their most wanted field.   This marketing plan points up the market fragments and the line of attack of employing to get consumers and generate a compact income stream. Our exclusive emphasis is giving out chances for the round-the-clock working undergraduate that is unable to go to a university grounds for courses.   A twist that gives us a benefit over our opponents is of giving pupils more preferences of what is accessible in selection from a more range of majors. From experience, many virtual universities have a very rudimentary collection of MBA degree majors.    The university will fund expansion for the college in receiving the capitals to upkeep the quantity of demand for majors not supplementary in most virtual recognized academies. Correspondingly by providing consulting facilities to fashion appraisals for the demand of the majors that are desired the greatest by latent pupils.  Target Market: In the present day business biosphere, the importance and standing of clienteles is not something that would be put to one side by businesses. In defining a target market you need to decide if your item for consumption is worldwide or countrywide in choice? Or is it more prospective that you will vend it principally in your own district or public (Mann, 2003)? In the circumstance of an online MBA Program, the key market is essentially nationwide and worldwide. Pupils want to go to the United States from all around the world to go to a USA school. In addition, there is a marketplace for students in the States that wish to go to school overseas. The secondary market is native people who have kinfolks and are too busy to join a campus and go to lecture.(Advantage and Disadvantage of Distance Learning, 2011) Likewise, we would be targeting the middle class i.e. students who cannot afford to pay huge amounts of fees to get a degree. An online Program would give them the opportunity to do the MBA online because they would be offered financial convenience and time saving both at the same time. Furthermore, a lot of working class cannot go to a university because of their jobs but they wish to pursue their academic career, so it would be of an advantage for those people to get admission online and get their degree side by side with their job. Competition: At the moment, the world is going IT at such a high rate that it is impossible and very expensive to compete on an online world. People all around the world are too busy and have very strict schedules that most of the time undergraduates find it difficult to join a campus for their Master’s degree. Likewise, numerous virtual companies have opened up around the world offering convenience and time saving allowing students to get their Master Degree with an ease. The major competitions that would be faced by us include all the virtual universities that offer online MBA around the world. The online programs in USA are offered by many universities such as Washington universities that have a good reputation and students would love to join these universities. (Pro Quest Dissertations & Theses Database, 2011) The competition would be very high because the biggest advantage of an online MBA program is convenience. So all the universities, that offer quality and convenience come under the umbrella of the competition. To be competitive we would offer reasonable course prices, a much larger variety of courses and we it would be our best try to get the best possible faculty. If we cater to these three factors it would be very easy to get the market and attain our goals. Our Service: Our Online MBA programs offer the students tractability, self-speed and suitability of appearing in the classes from any whereabouts on condition that the locality has internet link for the learner to login into the virtual classes. The online students, who follow their MBA connected could appear in the classes, download their training provisions and projects online and at an ease, submitting their projects from their luxury position through on-site internet connection. The suppleness in the time tables of online education permit students to design their individual study patterns centered on their book learning quickness and opportune schedule. The characteristics best suit the working class who have busy at work calendar. The everyday travelers are capable to take benefits of reading wherever and at any time with an online MBA class. Similarly, the MBA program would be a year long program. Offering variety of courses to the students and giving them the opportunity to enroll themselves in the courses they wish to take. Online examination would be there. Basically the exam will be an open book exam but the exam difficulty level would be high and a deadline would be given to the students to submit their papers online. Likewise, student’s attendance would also be held online. All reading materials and assignments would be available online basically students will have to go through the experience of self- studying but obviously for conferences or guest lectures a student need to have softwares like Skype and such to go online and participate in the video conference. Marketing Budget: The marketing budget we need would not be very much. Initially a budget of around 50000$ would be enough to launch a website and hiring faculty and online advertisement. Similarly, we would like to advertise our program through media like television and newspaper. Later on, if we go into a negative budget we are optimistic to receive a lump sum amount of money from the admissions of the students. The admission fee would be around 200$- 500$ and the tuition fee might sum up to 1000-1200$. Faculty would be given their payroll on the basis of the classes they take and the number of students taking the course. There would be a very less amount of fringe benefits given to the faculty. Least we could do is providing them with a free internet connection that is pay almost half of their internet expenditures. Location: We plan to become affiliated with a renowned university who does not offer online MBA program. Doing so, would be advantageous for both of us in the sense that we would be having a name and likewise the university will be adding a new prospect to their service they are offering. They would also offer us a budget that would allow us to further reduce our initial budget. A website with would be designed by an expert to give it a very professional and a fashionable look. The website operation would be central and it would be ensured that each individual has privacy and the hacking and spamming issues be taken care of with great caution (Grizzell and Burrell, 2008).  Pricing Strategy: The pricing strategy depends on the course and the credit hours. The course with less credit hour that is 2 will be charged less in contrast to the courses that have more credit hours. A particular curse would be charged around 200 $ and it is compulsory to take almost 6 courses a semester. Likewise, in case a student has failed a course and wishes to retake it would cost him an additional 50$ to retake the course. Summary and Implementation: The program will come into action once we get affiliated to the university. At the moment we have sent our application to a few universities as soon as we get a reply we would join the university that seems to be most advantageous in every aspect. After getting the license of affiliation we would start with the website for which we need an expert and to operate an LMS that is Learning Management System we need to find an operator who is efficient in IT related programs and at most knows how to un-hack an account and who can take care of individuals responsibility. Likewise, in co-operation with the affiliated university we would be asking the faculty to apply and likewise, coordinating with their time schedules class time table will be designed. Moreover, as we are an internet based organization it would be very important to have an internet connection that is available twenty four/ seven. This would also increase our costs because for backups in case the light goes off we would need a generator. What is more, we plan to get a contract with companies like Cisco to get Wi-Fi connection as students logging in and uploading different assignments online it would be important to have a high quality internet available. This would also increase the cost. (MBA Online Resources, 2011) Additionally, it is crucial to know what strategies are being used by the competitors. Their advertising style, marketing plan and goals need to be realized so that we set our goals accordingly. Online surveys would be done to become aware of the course student plan to take and prefer to take. As IT is always revolving and changing with every breath we take, IT costs can become a constant course of tension, in order to get rid of this worry we plan to hire IT specialists who would act like a Research and Development department for our organization. IT costs will be the heaviest cost that we assume to have. But in the long term this would be beneficial and might even reduce our costs if implemented successfully. Lastly, we “MBA with Convenience” plan to launch in January 2012 and plan to take in almost 750 students for our first batch who would graduate in the fall of 2014. The degrees would be sending out to students through self-courier service that we would be sending our own employees to give out the degrees to the students. But, for oversees students we plan to send them through emails. Last but not the least, we wish to offer students with acquaintance to practical functioning environment through placements. We wish to continuously introduce new ideas, concepts courses to our educational program to hit the snowballing needs of undergraduates in the flora and fauna such as the rough guide of where the students would be able to find better job opportunities. We would help them get jobs with our sources with well-known companies. Moreover, we plan to offer courses like Musicology and such courses to increase the interest of the students and help those who want to pursue a career in such fields but are unable to find a university offering such course and likewise, offering an online library free of cost to increase the knowledge of our students. References: “Advantage and Disadvantage of Distance Learning”,(2011), Distance-Learning-Guide-Dot- Com, Web. Reviewed on October 31, 2011, available at http://www.distance-learning-college-guide.com/advantage-and-disadvantage-of-distance-learning.html Grizzell. B. C., Burrell. D. N., (2008), “Competitive Marketing and Planning Strategy in Higher Education”, Academic Leadership Live: The online Journal, Vol. 9 (2), reviewed on October 31, 2011, available at http://www.academicleadership.org/article/competitive-marketing-and-planning-strategy-in-higher-education “MBA Online Resources”, (2011), eHow.com, Web. Reviewed on October 31, 2011, available at http://www.ehow.com/list_6562788_mba-online-resources.html “ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Database”, (2011), ProQuest, Web. Reviewed on October 31, 2011, available at http://www.proquest.com/enUS/catalogs/databases/detail/pqdt.shtml Read More