Strategic Recovery Marketing Report — Diagnosing Underperformance and Building a Sustainable Turnaround Plan
This is a case-based marketing assessment in which the student selects a real business that is currently underperforming or failing, diagnoses the causes, and builds a full marketing recovery strategy for it. The company choice is the student's own but requires module team approval, so the selection itself carries risk: a firm with thin public disclosure will starve the analysis, while an over-documented household name invites description rather than diagnosis. The deliverable is a formal report of around four thousand words, excluding references and appendices, referenced in APA 7. Appendices can carry supporting data, models and supplementary analysis, but not core content — a common way marks are lost is pushing substantive argument into an appendix to stay within the word limit. The report has two linked halves that students often treat as separate. The first is diagnostic: why is this business underperforming? This demands explicit application of marketing theory rather than a narrative of the company's troubles assembled from press coverage. The second is prescriptive: a recovery strategy that follows from the diagnosis. Recommendations that could have been written without the analysis — refresh the brand, invest in digital, improve customer experience — score poorly regardless of how well they are expressed. Where this module differs from a generic strategic marketing assessment is the sustainability and ethics dimension. The learning outcomes centre on sustainable marketing, social responsibility, and the intersection of marketing technology with sustainable practice. The marking criteria reward conclusions that show awareness of ethical and sustainability dimensions at every band above a pass. A recovery plan built purely on cost and revenue logic will therefore underperform against the rubric even if it is commercially sensible. The strongest submissions treat sustainability as part of the recovery mechanism rather than a section appended at the end. Assessments of this type increasingly sit within a tiered AI policy. Where a permissive tier applies, students may use AI tools for idea generation, structuring, source discovery, summarising notes, and proofreading or feedback — but not for producing the analysis itself — and must declare which tools were used and how, usually in a table placed before the reference list. Students are also expected to retain evidence of how their thinking developed, such as version histories or drafts, which can be requested if misconduct is suspected. Our support on assessments of this type is guidance-based. Typical areas of help include: advising on company selection and data availability, explaining how a diagnostic framework should structure an argument, showing the difference between descriptive and evaluative use of theory, clarifying how sustainability criteria are actually assessed in a marking rubric, checking APA 7 consistency, and reviewing a completed draft against the published criteria.
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