Week 2

Questions up for Discussion

One questions I had this week came from 'Analysis for Marketing Planning' and addressed the question of who is part of the 'buying market'.  In the book it says that children should be removed from the 'buying market'.  Maybe because I work for a toy company or maybe it's because I've seen Saturday morning cartoon commercials, but I disagree with this statement.  I think children are one of the biggest influencers of the buying market.  Maybe they aren't necessarily the ones going to pay for the product  (although more and more younger kids seems to be asking for gift cards to make their own toy purchase decisions) they are the ones that are picking out the toys they want.  After growing up in an age of the Furby, Tomagatchi, and Tickle-me-Elmo I can hardly imagine that kids should be removed from consideration in the 'buying market'.

Another question I had this week was addressed in class, and it looked like I was not the only one that had considered this scenario.  It appears that Drucker takes the stance that decisions should not solely focus on analytical/numerical analysis.  He makes the point that if there is something that cannot be put into numbers if has to be considered outside of the analysis, which I agree with.  The part I did not like in the book was that all examples he choose to use to support the theory that numerical analysis does not generally work were examples where the supporting information was incorrect.  In the case that the appropriate evidence was used to do the analysis it may have worked, but just because the assumptions were wrong does not make the idea of numerical analysis wrong.  Maybe it's because I'm an accountant, but I like the numbers that tell me a story.  It would actually make me think that more considerations should have been made prior to the analysis.  I used the example of 'Moneyball' in my posed questions as this was choosing players solely on statistical evidence and not looking at how good they look throwing a ball.  Although as someone who doesn't mind watching cute guys play sports, I support the latter theory as well.

Prompts

In the class activites there have been prompted discussion points and I'd like to address a few of those here.  First, we discussed how our own companies market to us as employees.  I don't work for a public company so I'm not going to announce where I work here, but I think most companies market to their employees.  We constantly receive information and news headlines on our intranet site with the latest developments.  We are encouraged to follow the cultures of our company.  We are in so many countries that individual cultures are addressed (we have a website that has general explanations about what to do and how to do it when traveling), as well as the general company culture.  We have quarterly update meetings with the whole site where it is announced how we are doing, what our strategy is, and future plans for growth and achievements.  There is a natural sense of pride at my company so I think not only does the marketing work, but our products speak for themselves in getting employees to stand behind it.  Our company leaders are definitely marketers.  I would say that the president of the US operations of our company meets all 8 of Druckers marketing/leadership principles. 

Another discussion was related to the view of growth being stopped or slowed is due to the failure of management per the article this week.  I do mostly agree with this assumption.  It is up to management to make decisions on behalf of a company to keep it thriving.  An example that comes to mind here is a real estate company I worked for.  In the earlier years of the company there were many conventional real estate sales where there were ordinary people buying and selling their homes.  Well over the past decade that had changed into bank foreclosures and banks selling homes to new buyers, with very limited conventional sales.  The company switched it strategy, reached out to banks, and became to list homes onto the housing market for the banks directly.  Had they focused solely on conventional listings, the company may not have thrived during a time when the housing market was in turmoil. 

Relating this class to my own career

I have a more personal discussion this week in addition to the prompts and questions from class.  I went to a gift card seminar in sunny Orlando, FL where I learned all about marketing gift cards.  I wanted to add a note here as it related to class that one of the presentations was about a customer survey that was done where 12 people went to 48 different stores and gave feedback about their gift cards.  Where they could find them in the store, whether there was packaging available, whether the associates helped them, and whether there were enough designs to choose from.  From this I learned that customers want more options!!  From the survey it was easy to see what the consumer wanted so learning my lesson from this experience, I will be back at work pushing our gift card program to our marketing department as it is in the consumers best interest and needs. 

Pharmacism

This week I reviewed the market report "Industry Outlook".  This report explains population rate, industry growth, and inflation.  These would be helpful to be aware of as a comparison.  If inflation is rising a lot, should be consider raising the price of the product to coincide or lower it so people may still be able to afford it with everything else on the rise?  We can use industry growth as a comparison point for our own growth - it should be at least consistent with industry norms.  Population growth wouldn't be as good to know as industry growth, but I would generally believe that these two would be correlated. 

This report also shows the costs associated with sales force and marketing research and the distribution between the various types of costs.  We can use this to see if there are any areas that are significantly lower or higher than others to determine where we can adjust costs. 

This week I also tried out some additional changes.  I increased in the grocery store sales force and the related co-op, and decreased the convenience store co-op.  I made these decisions based on the buying channels and the consideration that most people shop for cold remedies at grocery stores and few actually get them at convenience stores.  I slightly increased co-op advertising in general and POP advertising to see what that would do.  My net income went down over the previous period.  These decisions did not work as well for me as my consumer-based approach that I took last week.