From Marketing Strategy to Execution is WMBA 6667 at Walden, three semester credits, taken after WMBA 6060. The course grades one long build, a three-year marketing plan for an organization you choose, in which every audience, position, campaign and dollar has to be defended by something other than instinct.
What WMBA 6667 actually grades
The plan is the course. Walden's own description of 6667 says students are immersed in developing a comprehensive three-year marketing plan aligned to an organization's business strategy, and the graded work tends to arrive as pieces of that plan rather than as one submission at the end. The components named in the catalog are market segmentation, competitive analysis, brand positioning, consumer acquisition, and a financial justification for the whole thing. How those pieces are distributed across your particular section is a question only your syllabus answers.
Scoring guides in marketing courses reward a particular kind of sentence, and it is not the confident one. They reward a choice with a reason attached: this segment, because of these three data points; this position, because two competitors already own the alternatives; this channel, because that is where the segment already spends attention. A plan full of tactics and empty of justification collects marks for effort and forfeits the rows that carry weight.
Threads carry rubrics of their own. The mark you finish with is assembled row by row, which means a plan that felt persuasive to read can still lose to one that simply answered every row it was asked.
Build the plan skeleton before you name a company
Marketing plans go wrong at the outline stage, not the writing stage. Open the scoring guide for whatever is in front of you and paste every row into an empty document, keeping the order the guide uses. What you are holding is a skeleton your grader already agreed to.
Then do two things to it. Convert each row from grader language into a question you can answer, so that a row reading analysis of target segments becomes who exactly are we selling to and how do we know they exist in the numbers we claim. After that, note what each row is worth and size your sections to match. A competitive analysis row pulling twice the weight of an executive summary row should not end up the same length because the summary was more enjoyable to draft.
One last step takes ten minutes and saves a grade. Under each heading, write a single sentence stating the answer you intend to defend. If any heading refuses a sentence, that is the section you cannot yet support, and discovering it now costs far less than discovering it at eleven at night on submission day.
How we help in this course
Give us three things: the assignment as your classroom prints it, the scoring guide attached to it, and the organization you settled on with whatever background you have already gathered. Back comes a drafted component with the reasoning visible on the page, the sources named, and figures built so they reconcile with the sections around them.
Nothing about the terms changes for this course. Two days at the outside, drafting aimed at an A row by row, a rubric reviewer and a separate APA and originality reviewer both clearing the work before it reaches you, and revisions that keep going until the mark lands where you wanted it.
Because this course accumulates, tell us which components you have already handed in. Later pieces then match the segments, positioning and figures you committed to earlier, and that is the single most common place these plans end up contradicting themselves.
Weekly manuals for this course
No week pages exist for this course at the moment. Nothing about a Walden syllabus is public, so writing a manual for week four would mean guessing at what week four contains, and we would rather publish nothing than publish a guess. Each one appears here after a student in the course has shown us the real thing. Meanwhile the drafting side is unaffected, because it reads your classroom materials rather than our manuals: put the week into chat and it starts immediately.
In WMBA 6667 right now?
Send the plan component and its scoring guide. First premium sample free, back within two days.
The semester term this course sits in
Marketing plans are long documents, so the length of your term matters more here than in a course built from short papers. The MBA sits on Walden's semester calendar. Its other calendar, the quarter, runs on the nursing side of the university and is published as a full term of 11 and 12 weeks with a shorter half term inside it, none of which describes what you are working in.
The three 2026 spans are published as spring, 5 January to 26 April; summer, 4 May to 23 August; and autumn, 7 September to 27 December. Count the days in any one and you get 111, a little under sixteen weeks. That sixteen is our arithmetic on Walden's dates rather than a number Walden prints, since the calendar page carries dates only. Sixteen weeks is also why a three-year plan is a reasonable ask here and would not be on a shorter term.
Submission times are fixed and quoted in Central. Work closes at 10:59 p.m. Central, which is 11:59 p.m. Eastern. Separately, the university expects you inside the classroom during the opening week, posting an assignment or a discussion contribution. Missing that is an administrative problem, and a strong plan later in the term does not undo it.
Nobody outside your section can tell you how many graded items it carries, and we are not going to invent a grid for you. Walden itself says posting requirements move between courses and between weeks of one course, so the syllabus you were issued is the only schedule worth planning against.
How to actually write WMBA 6667: where to begin
Pick the organization before you pick anything else, and pick it for data rather than for affection. A plan needs a market you can size, competitors you can name, and a product whose buyers leave a trace somewhere you can reach. Public companies leave annual reports and analyst coverage behind them. Your own employer works well if you can write about it without disclosing anything confidential. A start-up that exists only in your head is the hardest possible version of this assignment, because every number in it has to be invented and then defended.
Segment before you position, and segment on something that changes behavior. Age brackets and income bands are easy to write and rarely explain why anyone buys. A segment becomes useful when you can say what problem those people are trying to solve, where they already look for a solution, and what would make them switch. Then size it. Even a rough estimate assembled from a published market figure, a stated penetration rate and plain arithmetic will outscore a confident sentence with nothing underneath it, provided you show the steps and label the assumptions as yours.
Positioning is a claim about the space inside a buyer's head, not a slogan. Write it as a sentence naming the segment, the alternative you are being compared against, and the one thing you do that the alternative does not. If that sentence would still be true with a competitor's name substituted in, it is not a position, it is a description.
The title of the course is the assignment. Every strategic claim has to arrive with the mechanics that would make it happen: which channel, which message, which quarter, whose job, what it costs, and what number tells you it worked. That hinge is what the scoring guide is built on, and plans that lose points are almost always strong on strategy and vague on the second half of the title.
The money section is where these plans are won and lost, because it is the only part a grader can check against itself. Build it from the tactics you already listed rather than from a round figure that feels plausible. Cost each activity, project the revenue it is meant to produce, state the assumptions in a line beneath the table, and run the arithmetic where the reader can follow it. Label the whole thing as an illustration resting on stated assumptions. A three-year projection nobody can trace is worth less than a one-year projection somebody can.
Sources are where an MBA plan proves it is graduate work. Go in through the Walden Library instead of a search engine: the market research and business databases sitting behind your enrollment carry the industry reports, category data and peer reviewed marketing scholarship a rubric like this quietly assumes you consulted, and a business librarian will find the report for your category faster than you will. Summarizing means one paragraph per source, each politely reporting what its author said. Synthesizing means putting two sources over your own market and letting them disagree: if one study says your segment buys on price while an industry report says the category is consolidating on convenience, name the conflict and rule on it for your organization. Before you keep a citation, say what work it is doing in the plan. If the answer takes more than a phrase, it is decoration.
Citations and APA the way Walden grades them
APA 7 applies to a plan document as much as to an essay, with one wrinkle. Marketing plans lean on material that is not journal articles, and industry reports, company filings, trade press and market data each have their own reference forms. Getting those wrong is a quiet, repeated deduction spread across the reference list. Tables and figures carry their own numbering and their own source lines, and every number you display has to be traceable to something. Walden's Writing Center hosts the title page and heading templates faculty mark against, and starting from one of those is simply cheaper than rebuilding the format and then arguing for it.
| Section | What goes in it | The failure that costs points |
|---|---|---|
| Executive summary | The plan compressed: who you are selling to, the position, the main programs, the money. | Written first and never revised, so it promises a plan the document no longer contains. |
| Market and segmentation | Named segments defined by behavior, sized with arithmetic the reader can see. | Demographic buckets listed with no reason they would buy differently from each other. |
| Competitive analysis | Named rivals, what each already owns in the buyer's mind, and the gap that leaves you. | A grid of competitor features with nothing said about what the grid implies for you. |
| Positioning and brand | One sentence a stranger could repeat, plus the proof that holds it up. | A slogan that would fit any company in the category equally well. |
| Acquisition and retention | Programs for winning buyers and for keeping them, treated as two different problems. | Retention mentioned once as loyalty and never given a mechanism or a budget. |
| Implementation | Activities on a three-year timeline with owners, sequence and dependencies. | A calendar of campaign names with nobody responsible and no order that matters. |
| Financial justification | Costs, projected returns, stated assumptions, and arithmetic the reader can follow. | Round numbers arriving with no derivation, or totals that disagree with the tactics above. |
Discussion posts that earn their row
A marketing thread nearly always hands the class a decision and invites everyone to say what they would do, which is an invitation to have opinions at each other for a week. Treat your opening post as a miniature section of the plan instead: name the decision, put the evidence under it, attach the source that frames the evidence, and finish with the number that would tell you afterwards whether you were right. Reference something inside the post itself. Confidence with nothing cited underneath it scores as opinion against a row that specifically asked for evidence.
Two to four separate days is the spread Walden's grading policy recommends, alongside participation it describes as substantive, consistent and on time, and the practical reason is that a thread posted in one sitting has nothing to respond to. The reply row is scored apart from the initial post, and agreement collects nothing on it. Ask a classmate how they would size the segment they named, point at the competitor their positioning statement steps around, or work out whether their budget can afford the channel they picked. How many replies count, and the day the thread shuts, come from your own week's instructions.
The mistakes that cost points in WMBA 6667
- A plan describing the market at length that never states what the organization will do differently because of it.
- Segments defined by demographics alone, so nothing in the document explains why those people buy.
- Positioning written as advertising copy, which leaves the positioning row with nothing to grade.
- Tactics with no owner, no sequence and no date, which is strategy wearing an execution label.
- Financial projections that contradict the activities listed two pages earlier.
- Sources pulled from company marketing pages and content sites rather than the library databases.
- Components handed in across the term that each quietly pick a different target segment.
WMBA 6667 questions students actually ask
Can I write the plan for the company I work for?
Usually yes, and it is often the strongest choice, because you already understand the buyers and the constraints. Two cautions apply. Anything covered by a confidentiality agreement stays out, and where a real figure is sensitive you can work from a stated approximation and say so. The second is harder: you know the internal politics, so it is tempting to write the plan that would survive your leadership team rather than the plan the evidence supports. Scoring guides reward the second one. Check the week's instructions as well, since some assignments name the organization for you.
How do I size a market when I cannot find the data?
Build the estimate and show the build. Start from a published figure you can cite, narrow it with a stated assumption, then narrow it again, writing each step where the reader can see it. A defensible estimate carrying three visible assumptions scores better than a precise number with no source, because your reasoning is what gets marked rather than your answer against a key. Say plainly that the estimate is yours and rests on the assumptions listed. Where the library holds an industry report for your category, start there, since a business librarian will find one faster than you will.
How detailed does the three-year part have to be?
Detailed enough that somebody could act on year one, and honest about how much anyone can know about year three. Front-load the specificity. The first year should carry named activities, sequence, owners and cost. Later years work better as direction plus decision points: what you expect to be true, what would have to happen first, and what evidence would make you change course. A plan pretending to know month by month what happens twenty-eight months out reads as invention, and graders in this course have seen plenty of it.