This course follows one organisation from start to finish. You'll pick it now, and every task in every topic is applied to it. By the end your work adds up to one portfolio: a single collection of work that shows an employer what you can do.

The course runs in a fixed order through four stages. Foundation is about reading your market, your customers and the rules, and setting the numbers you'll be judged on. Practitioner plans and briefs a campaign. Commercial follows the money. Leader proves what worked and makes the case for what comes next. Each stage ends with a milestone that gathers your work: a strategic audit, a campaign plan, an ecommerce plan for a second market, and a performance review with a business case.

Choosing your organisation. Good choices are your employer, a placement, a live client, a club or society, or a business you know well as a customer. Pick one with enough public information: a website, social accounts, reviews and, ideally, a few news stories. You don't need a job or inside data. Every task works from what anyone can see.

Confidentiality. If your employer won't let you share details, either anonymise it ("a regional builders' merchant") and leave out anything private, or choose a well-documented public organisation instead. Never put confidential figures in your portfolio.

UK example: if your organisation is a UK company, its registered name, number, address and filing history are on the public register at Companies House, free to search. That's a quick way to check you have the right legal entity, and you'll use it again in Lesson 1.3.

Progress markers. Each topic has a progress marker, a plain statement of what you can now do. You rate yourself on a four-point scale: not yet, with support, independently, could teach it. Be honest: "not yet" on day one is the normal starting point, and the point of the course is to move it.

If you're stuck for a choice, use Larkfield Coffee Roasters for this topic and switch when you're ready. Larkfield is fictional and its figures are illustrative.

Your organisation's digital marketplace is everywhere its customers, competitors and partners meet it online. Think of it as the set of places a customer passes through on the way to buying, and the places they go afterwards to talk about it.

A practical map usually covers:

• search results, both the ordinary listings and the ads above them
• social platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and LinkedIn
• video, especially how-to and review videos
• online marketplaces, where your organisation might sell, or where competitors already do
• review sites and the reviews inside marketplaces and maps
• apps, including delivery and booking apps
• the organisation's own website and email
• the offline places these connect to: shops, cafés, events, branches

Some of these places are run by intermediaries: businesses that sit between your organisation and its customers, such as a marketplace, a delivery app or a comparison site. They can bring customers, but they set the rules and take a cut.

A useful shorthand is owned, paid and earned. Owned is what your organisation controls, like its website and email list. Paid is space it buys, like ads. Earned is what others say, like reviews and press. You'll go deeper into these in Module 7.

UK example: the Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes a monthly retail sales release. Its September 2026 figures, published on 23 October 2026, put online sales at 28.8% of all retail sales. Online matters a great deal, but most retail spending in that month still happened somewhere else. So a good map never stops at the screen: it shows how online and offline places feed each other. Someone might find a café on a map app, then buy its coffee beans online a week later.

For each place on your map, ask three things. Is your organisation there? What happens there (discovery, comparison, purchase, complaint)? Who else is there competing for attention? Write one line for each. A map that says "Instagram: we post twice a week; competitors run giveaways; customers ask about delivery in the comments" is far more useful than a list of logos.

Business intelligence is gathering, checking and organising information about your market, customers and competitors so that decisions rest on evidence. In this topic you'll use secondary research: information someone else has already collected. It's free, fast, and the right place to start before asking anyone a question yourself.

Good free UK sources include:

• official statistics from the ONS, on retail, households and the economy
• Companies House filings: a company's officers, filing history and accounts
• trade bodies for your sector, which often publish summaries of their members' views
• Google Trends, which shows how interest in a search term changes over time and by region
• competitors' websites and job adverts: prices, ranges, and the skills they're hiring for, which hint at their plans
• review sites: what customers praise and complain about, in their own words
• social listening: reading public conversations about a brand, a product or a topic

Each has limits. UK example: Companies House filings are public, but many small companies file abridged or micro-entity accounts with very little detail, so you may find no revenue figure at all. The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 will change what small companies must file; in June 2026 the government moved the accounts changes to April 2028, so check Companies House's current guidance before you rely on a filing rule. Google Trends shows relative interest on a scale of 0 to 100, not the number of searches, so it can tell you a term is rising but not how many people searched for it.

Judging a source. Ask four questions. Who produced it? When? How do they know (did they measure it, survey people, or repeat someone else)? Why did they publish it (to inform, to sell, to campaign)? An official statistic, dated and with its method published, is usually high reliability. A supplier's blog claiming "sales are booming" is low.

Keep a source log. For every claim, write the claim, the source, the date and a reliability rating (high, medium or low) with a one-line reason. It takes minutes and saves you from repeating something you can't back up.

AI activity: ask an AI assistant for a PESTLE of your organisation's sector. Then check every point against a named source and mark it verified, wrong or unverified. Note what the AI got wrong or out of date, and add only the verified points to your source log. AI tools can sound sure about things that are old, invented or about another country.

Scanning the environment means looking at the forces outside your organisation that it can't control but must respond to. Two tools help: PESTLE and a competitor snapshot.

PESTLE stands for political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental factors. Treat it as a prompt list, not a form to fill in. Ask of each letter: what is changing that could affect our customers or our costs? Leave a box short if nothing much is happening there. Six thin boxes are worse than two strong ones.

UK example: on the legal row, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 banned fake reviews from 6 April 2025. For any organisation that relies on reviews, that's a legal factor worth noting, and you'll return to the rules in Module 5.

A competitor snapshot describes up to five competitors on the same few points:

• who they are (a named business, or a type such as "national subscription brands")
• their offer and price point
• the channels they use, taken from your marketplace map
• what customers say about them, from reviews
• one strength and one weakness

You may name real competitors for your own organisation. Stick to what you can see and source.

From findings to implications. A finding is a fact you have sourced. In Larkfield's scan, one finding is that more people own home brewing equipment. An implication answers "so what for us?": more people brewing at home means more people who care about freshness, so Larkfield should make its freshness easy to see. An implication should suggest something your organisation might do, stop doing or watch. Each one needs a source behind it, so point it to a row in your source log.

Three good implications are the goal. They don't need to be dramatic. They need to be true, relevant and specific to your organisation. Read the worked example later in this topic before you write yours: it shows a full scan for Larkfield, from map to implications. Later topics build on this scan: your research in Module 2 starts from what your source log already shows.