A $32,050 Plan for Tuesdays and Thursdays: The Assembled Marketing Plan for a Family Orchard, With Every Dollar Tied to a Segment and a Measure
Student Name
American College of Education
MRKT5003: Marketing Management: Strategy, Impact, and Engagement
Module 6 Assignment
Instructor Name
March 25, 2028
The Plan in Brief
Seven of every ten on-farm dollars at the composite Harwell Hill farm arrive during two autumn months, and most of those arrive on Saturdays and Sundays, when parking fields fill before noon. This plan does not try to grow weekend demand. It uses the orchard's idle weekday capacity to serve two segments that are free when the farm is quiet: families with children under five, through Little Pickers weekday mornings from May to October at $10 a child or a $65 season pass, and kindergarten through third grade school groups, through a standards-based Orchard Field Trip at $9 a student, supported by a sponsored scholarship fund. Each is reached mainly through partners, libraries, preschools, parent groups, district coordinators and teachers, rather than paid advertising.
The first-year targets are 1,290 child places across 46 Little Pickers sessions, 120 season pass holders, 4,000 weekday family visits in the autumn, up from about 2,100, and 80 school groups, up from 31. A plan this small succeeds or fails on whether the right people hear about it at the right moment, which is why most of the budget goes to moments rather than to media.
The Budget, Line by Line
The budget for the teacher segment is $9,500: $4,200 to design, print and send the teacher guide to 212 schools, $800 for a practicing teacher to review it before release, $600 for materials at the regional professional development day, $2,400 for class photographs and post-visit activity cards for 80 groups and $1,500 for the June teacher evening. Every line serves a moment in the teacher journey mapped in Module 5, and the guide receives the largest share because it is both the main message and the proof of the position.
The budget for the parent segment is $5,550: $1,800 for library activity cards and supplies for summer story times at the pavilion, $3,000 for photographs and short videos of real families at the dwarf block, taken with written permission, and $750 to cover the fruit and treats for about 250 free referral sessions. The parent budget is smaller because the channels that reach this segment best, other parents, cost least.
Shared costs are $12,000: $9,600 for a seasonal marketing coordinator working ten hours a week, who manages partner relationships, the booking-source codes and the season pass notes, and $2,400 for a booking system upgrade that supports codes, deposits and text reminders. Finally, $5,000 is held as a test reserve, to be spent only if the partner channels fall short of target by the end of August, on the paid social media test named in Module 5. The total is $32,050. Capital items already approved, the stroller path and changing station, are outside this budget, as is the scholarship fund, which sponsors will provide.
What Each Customer Is Worth
Rust et al. (2004) argued that marketing spending should be judged by its effect on customer equity, the total discounted value of a firm's current and future customers, rather than by short-term sales alone, and Gupta et al. (2004) showed that customer lifetime value can be estimated from margins, retention and a discount rate using data most firms already hold. For a Little Pickers family, the estimate is simple. An engaged family visits about four times a season and contributes about $20 a visit after the cost of what it buys, and a family's youngest child stays in the under-five segment for about three seasons. At a 10 percent discount rate, that family is worth about $220, before counting the weekend visits it will likely make once the child starts school.
Against that, the parent budget plus half of the shared costs, about $11,550, would need to win about 1,900 additional weekday families to meet the target, a cost of about $6 a family. Even if the plan achieved only a third of its target, the cost of winning each family would remain well below its value. The field trip is a closer call. A school group contributes about $116 a year after direct costs, and a grade-level team that rebooks for five years is worth about $480. Winning the 49 new groups the target requires would cost about $15,500, or about $316 a group, so the program pays back only if most teachers rebook. The trip's wider value, children bringing their families back, will be measured with a code on the take-home apple bag.
Measures and Decision Rules
Farris et al. (2010) recommend that every marketing measure be defined precisely, tied to a decision and reported in a form managers can act on. The plan sets measures at each stage of the journeys in Module 5. Before the visit, the measure is bookings by source code, reported weekly, which gives the cost per booking for every channel. At purchase, the measures are session fill rate, pass sales and field-trip bookings against the calendar. After the visit, they are repeat sessions per pass holder, referral codes used, teacher comments received, rebooking rate for the following year and family visits carrying the apple-bag code.
Each measure triggers a decision. If Little Pickers sessions average fewer than 20 children by the end of July, the orchard will cut to one morning a week in the autumn and release the test reserve for paid social media. If fewer than 50 field trips are booked by September 15, it will contact every district coordinator directly and extend the booking window to early November with an indoor option for rain. Any channel whose cost per booking is more than three times the plan average by the end of the season will be dropped in the second year. And if fewer than half of the first year's teachers rebook, the field-trip program will be reviewed as a whole, since its value depends on repeat bookings.
Why This Plan and Not a Bigger One
A larger plan was possible, with regional advertising, a new corn maze and more weekend events, and several neighbors have taken that route. It was rejected because Module 1 showed that the orchard's constraint is weekend capacity, not awareness. Every element of this plan aims at the days and segments where the farm has room, and every dollar has a measure attached. If the first season meets its targets, the same logic extends naturally to the older adults and weekday taproom visitors that Module 2 set aside.
The plan also carries risks the owners should accept knowingly. It depends on partners, libraries, preschools and school districts, whose cooperation the orchard cannot buy and whose calendars it does not control. It relies on staff who can guide three-year-olds and second graders well, which seasonal hiring does not guarantee, so the program coordinator will train every guide before the first session. And its results in the first season will be small in dollars, perhaps $100,000 to $150,000 of added weekday revenue, even if every target is met. The case for it rests on what it builds for later seasons: a base of families who know the orchard before their children reach school age and a set of teachers who bring a new class every autumn.
References
Farris, P. W., Bendle, N. T., Pfeifer, P. E., & Reibstein, D. J. (2010). Marketing metrics: The definitive guide to measuring marketing performance (2nd ed.). Pearson Education.
Gupta, S., Lehmann, D. R., & Stuart, J. A. (2004). Valuing customers. Journal of Marketing Research, 41(1), 7-18. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.41.1.7.25084
Rust, R. T., Lemon, K. N., & Zeithaml, V. A. (2004). Return on marketing: Using customer equity to focus marketing strategy. Journal of Marketing, 68(1), 109-127. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.68.1.109.24030
How this MRKT 5003 Module 6 example is structured
MRKT 5003 Module 6 usually assembles the plan with budget allocations and the measures behind them; your classroom's instructions decide the length and whether an executive summary is required. This example opens with the plan in brief, then allocates the budget line by line with a reason for each amount. It estimates what each customer is worth and what each costs to acquire, and closes with measures at every stage of the journey and the decision each measure will trigger.
MRKT5003 Module 6 questions, answered
What does MRKT5003 Module 6 usually ask for?
MRKT5003 Module 6 usually asks for the assembled marketing plan, including budget allocations and the measures that will show whether it worked. Your classroom's instructions decide the length and whether an executive summary or presentation is also required.
How detailed should a marketing budget be?
Detailed enough that each line names what it buys, which segment it serves and why it received that amount. A budget split into broad categories without reasons rarely earns full credit.
What makes a good marketing measure?
A precise definition, a source, a reporting schedule and a decision it will trigger. A measure nobody would act on is decoration, however carefully it is tracked.
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