MARK7010 Strategic Brand Management Assessment

About This Assessment Brief

An assignment briefing takes place in Session 3 when you will have the opportunity to meet your client, Anila Preston, Founder and CEO of the British Alpaca Fashion Company (Alpaca  Fashion Company Ltd.) and owner of the EKO ALPAKA brand.

Assessment Instructions: The Eko Alpaka Future Brand Positioning Project 

The Oxford Brookes Brand Consultancy (OBBC) has acquired a good reputation in the marketing industry. This must have been the reason why within the space of just a few weeks OBBC has been approached by several organisations to pitch for a brand positioning  project. 

OBBC is a pretty new and small brand management consultancy consisting of a group of lecturers and practitioners from various marketing disciplines. Since they can’t work on several pitches at the same time, they urgently need your help.  

The OBBC team knows that in terms of its capacity, it could only work for one more client in  2024. However, the OBBC team is not sure which of the brand positioning projects they should pitch for. This is where you come in. They decide to hire up-and-coming brand management experts on a freelance basis. So, they are asking you to look at the British Alpaca Fashion 

Company and their EKO ALPAKA brand, which is one of the organisations that recently approached OBBC. 

The British Alpaca Fashion Company is a leading independent company in the luxury fashion industry committed to circularity, and ethical production, as well as creating sustainable textiles and knitwear. All products bearing the EKO ALPAKA label have a digital passport which provides full traceability as to the source of fibre, design, and manufacture. The founder of the company, Anila Preston, and her team never want to stand still because their markets are permanently evolving and changing. They always aim to be ahead of the competition and know what the ‘big picture’ changes in society and the important ‘zeitgeist’ trends in the markets are. 

Therefore, OBBC is pitching now to help the British Alpaca Fashion Company prepare for a future brand positioning of EKO ALPAKA that takes the latest broader societal trends as well as a comprehensive market analysis into account. Due to time constraints, OBBC decided for the initial pitch phase to focus geographically on the UK market only.

Learning Outcomes

ANALYSIS: What is this brand about? What are the key meanings, manifestations and stakeholders of the brand? What does the ‘product’ portfolio currently look like?  What are the brand’s current vision, mission and core values? What are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats? How is the brand currently positioned? Your analysis is expected to look at a variety of elements of the brand.  This should include the brand’s IDEOLOGY, CAPABILITIES,  

CONSUMERS/STAKEHOLDERS, COMPETITION and ENVIRONMENT.  Mark allocation: 30% 

∙ STRATEGY: Based on your analysis, you are expected to discuss two different potential future positioning options for the brand which could be established in the UK  market in autumn/winter 2024. You then need to justify/evaluate which of the discussed positionings has the most potential, i.e. you need to choose one positioning option and justify your decision. You can extend a positioning strategy that already exists, but you need to justify why this is the best option. Finally, you are expected to make suggestions as to how the brand positioning idea could be transformed into strategic frameworks that can be used to brief the client’s marketing team who needs to bring this positioning idea to life. In this context you must apply one or more of the following frameworks: (a) SBM Vision, Mission & Values; (b) SBM  Brand Pyramid; and/or (c) Transformation Grid. Mark allocation: 30%  

∙ IMPLEMENTATION: Based on your strategic framework(s), you need to develop and explain implementation activities to show how, for example, the client’s UK  marketing team could implement the core strategic idea that you have developed with different specific stakeholders. This needs to contain an activity in terms of co-creative new product development (NPD). As part of this NPD, one implementation activity needs to utilise social media-based communications or other latest digital technology. Mark allocation: 30%