Week 8

Marketing 640 - Week 8

It has been a busy week!  There were some class prompts I'll start with this time around. 

One we began to talk about in class was Drucker's suggestion that the customer ultimately determines marketing decisions and what a business is because they are the ones buying the product.  I believe that there are some businesses that do not follow this thought process, but unfortunately I don't think they stay in business very long.  Not focusing on what customers want is ultimately setting yourself up for failure.  Sure not everything that people want can be achieved, but if there are many requests over and over again companies would need to seriously consider these and reach out for feedback.  Strategies like focus groups and customer feedback forms are helpful ways to address this and coincide with Drucker's suggestion.

Another Drucker discussion was on the ability to predict the future.  Drucker knew that strategic analysis could not predict the future - so the question was asked, why would you focus on historical data to predict buying habits if this was true?  I think this question somewhat relates to the one above.  Although we cannot know all the factors that are causing decisions in the future, we can use historical data to the best of our ability.  By looking at what customers want and their buying habits and trying to make decisions around that seems to be the best possible approach.  Ignoring information would be less helpful.  So even though we cannot predict everything that will happen we have to use the information we have as best we can.

One last Drucker prompt related to his '5 Certainties' of the future and whether these will change in the next 50 years.  These Certainties are:

1. The collapsing birthrate in the developed world.
2. Shifts in distribution of disposable income.
3. New definitions of performance in an organization.
4. Global competitiveness
5. Growing incongruence between economic globalization and political splintering.

I have to say for someone who mentioned we could not predict the future, Drucker seemed to nail it. In all honestly I can't imagine any of these changing in the next 50 years.   His prediction seems to be that things will change, and since I can't imagine we go stagnant all of a sudden I believe he is right.

Other Blogs

This week we were also asked to look into 3 other blogs in class.  I looked at Christine's, Mindy's, and Kenny's blogs.

I'll start with Christine's blog.  I really liked her in depth look into the Pharmasim assignment.  It made me think about how our team addressed the first round and it seemed to very different from what their team did.  I also like her comments on how Pharmasim decisions are not entirely like real-life because you can't adjust certain things, like her example of the dollar value associated with training sales staff.  I think this is a great point, there are many things that you could change in your decisions in real-life that you can't change in the simulation.  It seems like their team had a good plan going in and really went for it.  She also addressed an interesting article she found.  I think adding interesting articles helps classmates get to know each blogger a little better.

Mindy's blog was the next one I read.  She also addressed a lot of the Pharmasim areas.  In her blog she used specific reports that her group liked, and that it helpful to hear what other groups are looking and using to make decisions.  She also went on to address the 'try this' strategy of push/pull marketing.  That is one of the things I looked at in making our team decisions in the first round too.  In the week before she mentioned JC Penney and I've found their recent marketing decisions interesting too.  I think I had previously discussed them in one of my earlier blog posts, they seem to be having a lot of trouble trying to decide what customers want.  I think it took a lot for them to try something new and now address it's failure and go back to the old way.

Lastly,  I looked through Kenny's blog.  He started discussing how the class relates to his construction job and that was really interesting.  It's nice to hear how others relate to the things we are learning in class.  He also addressed the 'try this' like Mindy did, but he related it more to his job instead of the Pharmasim simulation.  It makes sense what he discussed about having to use the pull strategy in his career.  By not being able to relate completely to the simulation makes it more interesting and allows for a different view point of what we are talking about related to marketing.

Pharmasim

This week Pharmasim was all about analysis.  Since we had our individual assignment due for the situation analysis there were no decisions to be made or tried, but rather just looking at how all other decisions have worked so far.  It was good to take a deep dive into the information and really get to know the reports better.  Putting together all the information and considering all the various ways to look into everything turned out to be very time consuming, but helpful in learning.  It will be more interesting to learn what teammates came up with and whether or not any of our ideas of key focus areas were in alignment.