The design department has been asked to plan an advertising campaign for Phoney Phones.  This is a large retail chain of (usually) small high street shops selling mobile phones and their accessories.  Many of their most recently acquired shops are in prime business locations like the larger 'out of town' shopping malls.  Their core business is in the sale of mobile telephones but they are realising that the initial market has become almost saturated and new and innovative marketing strategies will be needed to even maintain current sales volumes.  There are a large number of competitors in every town and city who, with the rapidly growing market did not present a problem.  Now that this has changed, these competitors are now aggressively marketing and this is having an impact upon sales.

The campaign focus must be to try and sell new mobile phones to existing mobile phone owners.  The four primary areas for our investigations will be using the following media:
television
radio
billboards
internet

Each of these areas needs to be thoroughly investigated in terms of audience impact and cost effectiveness.  The target age groups for the campaign will also need to be considered.  Will existing users wish to upgrade or replace their phones?  Are there any untapped market areas, for example those more senior citizens who have not yet obtained a mobile phone.  Please note your roles in this investigation and the mobile phone numbers of each of the team members which are identified in the following table:

Apart from the advertising media and potential market areas, it will be worth having some in-house expertise in the product ranges and the youth culture that surrounds the frequent users of mobile phones.  This role will be given to Alan who must investigate the following mobile phones in detail, as well as obtaining product summaries on all other in-stock products from our client.  

The three makes listed above are the product ranges that our clients would like to most heavily promote, as the profit margins to them, from these suppliers, far exceed those from other manufacturers.  Even if the products from these manufacturers do not feature in special offers or special deals, then Phoney Phones would like pictures of some of these products to appear in the advertising materials.  Phoney Phones sales director has suggested that our marketing to the business sector should include features of particular phones like the amount of talk time and standby time on a single battery charge.  This will need a study to identify brands that might entice the small business user, or corporate customers to change to Phoney Phones.

Whilst the board realise that this is a new market area for Hothouse, and it will therefore require much more background research into the market status and product ranges than many of our other clients, there is only a small allowance of budgeted time above that normally assigned for these tasks.  This means that the initial meeting to discuss our findings will take place on Wednesday 25th at two o'clock in the boardroom.
 
As we need additional resources to enable us to be prepared with such a short timeline, we have asked for an additional person to assist us.  For the next two weeks, Sally Bennett will be joining the team (on loan from the finance department).  I realise that some of you already know Sally, and I am sure that you will all make her very welcome to the team.  Sally (as from Monday morning when I will brief her) will be researching data on phone accessories and trying to identify the potential for the development of our client's market share in this area.  Sally will also present her findings at the meeting on the 25th.  

The time scale beyond our initial meeting will be to have several draft campaign ideas and costings for the clients by the following Tuesday and a completed campaign within 6 weeks.  I know that this will put added pressure on those of you with other portfolios to work on, but this takes priority over all jobs with the exception of Software Amerique.  Should the tight timeline present you with a desperate problem, please see Lynne as soon as possible, although the board does feel that it is possible to meet these deadlines, and are anxious to do so.