Market Phenomena Of Keystone Pipelines: Assessment Answer

Public Relation – It incorporates establishing good relations with people by obtaining favourable publicity, avoiding unfavourable publicity and building a good corporate image.  

Responsibilities of Monitoring Marketing Activities

The marketing activities as well as the promotional activities should specify who is responsible for the entire implementation of the marketing plan for the promotion of Keystone Pipeline’s service. On the other hand, it would also specify who is responsible to achieve each objective and goal (Ginevius, Podvezko and Ginevius 2013). Most importantly, it is also responsible for monitoring the plan implementation as well as took decisions depending on the outcomes. Records of the marketing activities of Keystone Pipelines should be kept by tracking several aspects of the initiatives taken by the marketing department of Keystone Pipeline such as generated sales, generated responses, reach, cost, and media used as well as promotion timing.

Evaluation of Business Performance

It can easily be determined how well Keystone Pipeline is performing by making a comparison of the outcomes of the initiatives to the goals and evaluating to what extent the organization can meet the targets. Thus, the financial indicators can also be used in this case for evaluating the business performance of the company and comparing it to that of various other organizations in this oil-pipeline industry (Zhu 2014). Both of the techniques or methods are valuable and important to evaluate the performance of the organization in an objective manner. Hence, in this situation, few variables can play a significant role in order to evaluate the business performance of the company, Keystone Pipelines such as operations, market, customers, products, internal variables, as well as financial variables.

The successful implementation of marketing activities of Keystone Pipelines should meet the following requirements (Terpstra, Foley and Sarathy 2012). 

Legal and ethical Requirements and cultural considerations

These particular requirements can be fulfilled by including the following factors

• Societal expectations
• Social responsibilities
• Privacy and security issues
• safety issues
• codes of practice and regulations
• guidelines and policies
• Legislation such as “Trade Practices Act”
• Ethical Principles
• Environmental Issues
• Cultural influences and expectations

Safety Requirements

These requirements can be met with the help of the occupational health and safety considerations. These are as follows:

• Building staff security and safety procedures at the events of promotion
• the arrangements of health and safety for the contractors
• safe handling of substances and equipment
• Staff safety who are working in isolated and remote location such as communication arrangements.

Monitoring Performance of the Marketing Plan

The marketing plan is the blueprint or a comprehensive document that can outline the marketing and advertising efforts of an organization for the up-coming year. The marketing plan of Keystone Pipeline incorporates typically the assessment of the competition and the market of the company, short and long-term marketing objectives and the operating budget break-down of the company (Gordon 2012). As the marketing plan of Keystone Pipeline is essential for the promotion of products and services of the company, thus, monitoring as well as controlling the marketing plan of that company is also necessary. Monitoring the marketing plan can be done with the following steps:

• Creating a plan for the review dates
• Development of a tracking system
• Coordinating the marketing and the business plan
• Making changes while required

Performance Gap Analysis

By analyzing the performance gaps within Keystone Pipelines, where gaps exist in the organization or with the overall staff and with the individual staffers as well can be determined. The performance gap analysis can also be done by determining what aspects are lacking in the employee performance in a specific position or of the organization compared to its competitors (Kollmann and Stöckmann 2014). The process of analyzing Performance gap can also determine what extra skills and training may be required for bringing individual employees or that entire organization up to a standard that is acceptable while the particular job aspects change.   

Addressing Performance Gap

The most effective way to mitigate the performance gap is providing additional training to the staffs of Keystone Pipelines. Manufacturing plant or making alterations in the logistics and designs of the office or purchasing new equipment can be another effective way to resolve the performance gap on the organization. 

Over Performance against targets for trends and set new targets

Over-performance analyses as well as target-setting, both are crucial to the process of development for an organization. Hence, in case of Keystone Pipelines, the over-performance of the organization should be analyzed against targets for trends (Bititci et al., 2012). The over-performance of Keystone Pipelines can be analyzed with the help of the following ways,

• Managing information
• Getting the most from the KPIs of the company
• Selecting KPIs
• Using and selecting KPIs
• Utilizing standardized measures

After analyzing the over-performance, the company should determine SMART targets. The target of Keystone Pipelines should be set on the basis of five factors such as specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound. The targets must be ambitious that would motivate the employees of the company.

Methods of Encouraging Staffs

In order improve the marketing performance of the employees who are involved in the marketing activities, it is very important for Keystone Pipelines to follow some methods to encourage the employees. The company can inspire the employees for sharing recommendations, knowledge, suggestions, skills and their experience by creating an environment inside the workplace that can encourage innovative action and thinking (Lăzăroiu 2015). By encouraging the staffs of Keystone Pipeline, competitiveness can be increased, efficient use of resources would be enhanced as well as staff retention would be maintained properly. Therefore, the methods through which the company can motivate the employees who are associated with the marketing activities are as follows:

• Encouraging an innovative culture inside the organization
• Rewarding employees
• creating more opportunities for the employees
• Have a space for collaboration
• Offering training
• Investment in resources 

Gathering Information about Customer Reaction to all aspects of Marketing Mix

Marketing mix is such a marketing tool that is utilized by marketers and in marketers. It is crucial while determining a brand or a product’s offer and is associated with four Ps such as product, price, promotion and place. Based on the factors of marketing mix, Keystone Pipelines should gather information regarding the customer reaction (Homburg, Kuester and Krohmer 2013). The most effective and significant way to gather information regarding the product, price, place and promotion is the review or the feedback system. Customer can give their feedback with the help of the review system by providing specific ratings as per all the four aspects marketing mix. These feedbacks are very important for the organization because, according to the feedbacks, the organization can make changes in their services.

Business Requirements to identify opportunities for change

Organizational changes are important for Keystone Pipeline in order to become successful in the oil pipeline industry. There are mainly two forces of changes such as the internal and external environments. This is because, the systems of the company depend on the external environment, any factor that interferes with the capability of the company for attracting the resources it requires, or it’s potential for producing and marketing its products can be viewed as the change force (Benn, Dunphy and Griffiths 2014). The change opportunities based on the customer requirements are simply the processes of changing needs and preferences of customers. It comes under the external forces of change. On the other hand, Person focused changes, knowledge and skills, technological change, individual or group expectations, inadequate administration process are simply the business requirements for identifying the change opportunities in the company. 

Reference List

Benn, S., Dunphy, D. and Griffiths, A., 2014. Organizational change for corporate sustainability. Routledge.

Bititci, U., Garengo, P., Dörfler, V. and Nudurupati, S., 2012. Performance measurement: challenges for tomorrow. International Journal of Management Reviews, 14(3), pp.305-327.

Competition and Consumer Act 2010. (2016). Legislation.gov.au. Retrieved 22 June 2016,

Customs Legislation Amendment and Repeal (International Trade Modernisation) Act 2001.

Dawson, R., 2012. Developing knowledge-based client relationships. Routledge.

Ginevičius, R., Podvezko, V. and Ginevičius, A., 2013. Quantitative evaluation of enterprise marketing activities. Journal of Business Economics and Management, 14(1), pp.200-212.

Goedhuis, D., 2013. National Airlegislations and the Warsaw Convention. Springer.

Gordon, R., 2012. Re-thinking and re-tooling the social marketing mix.Australasian Marketing Journal (AMJ), 20(2), pp.122-126.

Homburg, C., Kuester, S. and Krohmer, H., 2013. Marketing management: A contemporary perspective. McGraw-Hill Higher Education.