Last Post Week 11

            This is my last marketing blog post. Don’t be too sad. This whole blogging experience has made me want to make a crafting/cooking recipe blog. Which will of course join millions, but we will see. Anyways, what we did this week… This week we had to finish up PharmSim team play. We did pretty well, third place! This can be read about in the pervious blog post. Besides this we had to an individual assignment on PharmSim which is basically an advice memo for the “next management” team. You talk about the 4P’s moving forward, what the key successes are for the brands, and how the next team(s) should be organized. I went a little over the two page memo, and as always, probably could of written way more, but wanted to stay close to the page limit. The other assignments for the week were reading the last few chapters of my favorite class resource, Drucker! I love this book, incase you hadn’t noticed, and am seriously considering buying copies for my boss, and my bosses boss. Even though I work in events, we are grouped with our company’s marketing department, and I think they could really benefit from this book. At least benefit more than some book we had to read for a retreat one year about embracing our inner animal, and working with other’s inner animals…talk about a snore fest meets a what the heck is this book.

            So one of the chapters we read had to do with the idea that the quality of the product is not what the company think it is, but rather what the customer values the quality to be. I felt this was similar to Drucker’s argument that that customer is the driver of the value of a product, but contradicted a bit his teachings on how a business must create a customer. Regradless I found the lesson that quality is determined by the consumer and not the supplier a very true point. If a consumer only wants a product to last a short time then they are not going to care as much if it can hold up against hurricane, and thus pay the extra pricing to have what the supplier thinks is a higher quality product. Drucker’s example was bit more simplified than what I am saying. He talked about how there were these valves that the government wanted. Several companies were bidding the for contract to by the main supplier. The different companies used various materials that they though would add quality to the valves, and the valves themselves got very expensive and complicated. One company invested in lower quality materials. Who do you think won the contract? It was the company who made a lower investment in lower quality materials. This is because this was the only company that understood that the government only wanted the valves to pass inspection. This company made sure that all the valves that were sent to the government would pass their inspection, even if it meant throwing out failing valves. The other companies would just send their product over and their valves would fail. As a result the the company that had the simplest valve won the contract because it catered itself to what its consumer consider quality. Drucker also discussed that the quality can be not achieved by looking at the wrong task in the product or service. He used inner city schools as an example. He talked about how schools who succeeded had a different performance task of “enabling those who want to learn to learn”, where as those who were failing though of their task as helping the underprivileged.  The task is still to teach, but how to achieve that task is different and thus there is a difference in quality and ability to complete a task.

            The next chapter was about integrity. Now this is a topic that is drilled into every business student from day one, but yet it seems that there is still problems. “Drucker’s view on marketing integrity are:

1. You can make mistakes that will forgiven by people inside the company and customers and the government outside your organization-but a lack of integrity will not be forgiven.
2. Maintaining your integrity may cost you, but it is worth it.
3. Be true to yourself and to your values and beliefs.” (p. 225)

This chapter was brief, and it talked about different ethical standards that are not always that great in application. He believe Confucian ethics was the best of them all as they deal with relationships and interdependence. Besides the three on views the importance is to do no harm to others, and make sure to always be able to like what you see in the mirror. That is basically the gist of it, and decent advice for everything in life.

            The next chapter was titled “The Dangers of Marketing Professionalism”. Now what my understanding of this chapter is that people can be so focused on that one task of being professional, that they lose sight of the bigger goal. They do not realize that what they are doing is actually a part of the bigger goal. The person that loses sight of the overall goal can end up hurting the business because they are not putting the goals of the organization first. However, I do think that there needs to be a balance with workplace goals and professionalism. I say this because there was an article this week on yahoo that talked about how there is has been an increasing goal of organizations to increase collaboration amongst co-workers by restructuring offices so that there is more collaboration. However, there has been issues that this has decreased professionalism in the workplace and is causing efficiency problems. Here is the article: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/biggest-office-interruptions-224100453.html It just leads me to believe that all though there must be a defined balance between professionalism and company goals as people may become overly committed to them.

            The next chapter talked about not buying a customer. The overall concept of this is that companies should be cautious about their coupons and promotional discounts. If a company offers too many discounts they can end up cheapening their product to a point where customers will only buy when discounts are being given. The company tries to buy the customer, but ends up shooting itself in the foot. This is something I can see myself doing as a consumer with the store The Limited. This store has really great work clothes that are not necessarily over priced. However, I only purchase from them when I can get 50%, buy one get on free, or their clearance is an additional percentage off. If I can’t get any of these deals I don’t buy anything from the store unless absolutely necessary. This includes the clearance items. It the clearance items are not one sale I don’t buy. This absolutely insane but with all the discounts The Limited has offered I know there will be another deal just around the corner. This was pretty much what Drucker was talking about, that by offering all the discounts, and continually offering discounts, can cause a company to accidently cheapen their product and be dependent on these discounts to move product. 

            The last chapter of the book is about how Drucker has passed and if there is a future for his teachings. I think there are as they routed in ancient practices, and even now many students find them beneficial. Will some of his teachings become outdated, of course. However, the meat bones of the teachings will be what remains relevant and good.

            As this course ends, I want to thank you for reading this blog for the last 11 weeks. I hope you were able to learn something about marketing.

3rd Place = Bronze Medal

PharmSim is finaly over after weeks of individual and team play. The final result....Our team finished 3rd! After being in the bottom about midway through the simulation our team was able to battle back and "medal" if you will. We are all very excited about this. Would we have liked to do better, of course, but third is not a bad finish. We also had one of our best periods after the final advance. Our stock went from being the $30's to being the $50's. It was a huge jump. We seemed to do well everywhere else too. We had to deal with an issue of a sales person complaining about how their terriotry was to big and that is why they were doing so poorly verse another sales rep who had a smaller area but was out preforming the first sales rep. We didn't want the second sales rep's hard work and beneficial relationships with their terriorty to be hurt. So we decided to keep the rep's areas as they were. Well the rep that complained ended up quitting. Out group felt bad for a second, but guess what if this was a real person, and they quite everything a complaint wasn't resolved to their statisfaction then they would have a hard time maintaining a job. I do wish we had had a fourth option where we gave the complaining sales rep an assistant or spilt her territory so that a completely new rep was introduced to help her. However, this was not a solution. Wanted to share the good news of 3rd place. Go Team 1!

September Already, and Only One More Week

    The semester is almost over, and this both scary and exciting. This week was one reading, one video, and all group work. I already briefly talked about our Marketing Revision Plan. We are basically done with it. We are just putting on the finishing touches as of right now. We had wanted it to be done by now, but things come up, and honestly it basically is. The only issues are a section that doesn’t seem to be updated, mentioning some appendices we have in the actually document, and putting our names on it instead of Team 1. They seem like some quick easy fixes. It currently is exactly three pages of reading and then somewhere around 10 pages of appendices. Which is about five appendices. This whole appendix thing has definitely become a friend as it helps you make your point in a short time frame in the meat of the message. I will also say that I thought I knew PharmSim pretty well, but I feel that every time we do an assignment with it, my PharmSim knowledge grows. Hopefully, I have mastered it enough to earn a good grade with my team.

    The reading we did was on managing performance metrics. I definitely wish we had read this article earlier in the semester when we had to submit performance metrics for PharmSim. It would definitely had been helpful in trying to determine metrics for that assignment. The short sum up of that article is that there  are tons of performance metrics that can be used with a company. It is important that the metrics be evaluated yearly as the company grows certain metrics will change. Also, there must be a balance so that a whole picture is formed, without having so many metrics that a company is too bogged down by information and can’t form the picture. Also, the metrics must include all departments so that the picture is better formed. The balance of the metrics is important because if it is soley based say on marketing it could only show that marketing is doing well and not the rest of the company, and also it could show only the good and not the areas that need improvement.

     Our video this week was on variance analysis. This may have helped us earlier in the semester in determining how our company was doing, however, it is something we can use this week and next week. So there is an equation for this and called Net Market Contribution is NMC=MDxMSxSPxCDxM%-ME

MD=Market Demand

MS=Market Share

SP=Selling Price

CD= Channel discounts

MP=margin percent

ME=marketing expenses

This equation brings together volume variance (MD, and MS), margin variance (SP, CD, and MP), and marketing expenses (ME, naturally). The constant of the equation from year to year or from time period to time period is that of the marketing expenses. Everything else a company is looking at how it has changed. The equation can be done the current year and the previous year at least to allow comparison. Or you can do actual results and project results. It is up to the company to decide which one is the better to use.

That pretty much covers it for this week. Next week we should be advancing the last few periods, a class evaluation, an individual analysis memo on PharmSim basically, and our last weekly blog.

Quick Little Update

   Our main focus this week is writing the Pharmsim Strategy Revision Memo. This is a group project, and we basically need to examine our 15 page Pharsim Marketing Plan and Strategy document. Our examinations need to be condensed into 3 pages. Currently we have the SWOT and Key Issues, Strategy implementation assessment, and marketing goals and objectives figured out. Which is great, because we are making some real progress and the document is really coming together.

   It seems certain parts we were already doing like assessing how our strategy was working and why we wanted/had to deviate from our plan. As well as, as talking about goals and objectives we have for our products. It has been hard though fiting everything into 3 pages. It seems we would easily make this a 5 page document with the amount of information we want to put into it. However, we need to limit ourselves. I think our biggest concern is the performance evaluation. We didn't do so well on this in our first plan, so this is a big concern for us. Hopefully this time we hit the nail on the head a bit. We are putting the other parts together tonight, and will be proof reading and putting the final touches on it the next few days. We really want to make sure we aren't doing anything last minute and have enough time to catch mistakes that we missed with the initial plan. Also, so we have more than enough time to do our weekly blog post as well. Busy week ahead.

Week 9 - 6 hours of Group work, 3rd place...the week of 3's!

        This week had more group work than reading, as in no reading just group work. This is fine because my group is pretty cool. Last week we had to submit a strategy, that thing I talked about last blog post. This week we had to implement that strategic plan, and guess what it is a lot easier to think one up (of course based off of analysis of the data), than actually follow it. We tried to follow the plan as best we could, but we had to deviate to maintain competitive in the market. We figure changing the allotment of the budgeted money or percentages for message was more acceptable than say introducing a product we never talked about in our plan.

            We had thought briefly about introducing a child’s medication or even reformulating our product. However, we realized we never even talked about it in our plan, and to do so would have a huge major impact on our plan. Basically, null and voiding it all. After all that hard work on it, and the fact that it would pretty much be negated we figured that doing any of those things would not be too smart. However, and I hope I don’t end up regretting stating this, but we did deviate in other areas though. We realized that our idea of not spending more than $1 million for co-op and point of purchase promotions. We quickly realized point of purchase was something we wanted to put more than $1 million on. So we started pouring some more money into it. We tried to stay conservative, and if there was extra money in the budget we would put some of that money into here. We got frustrated though with co-op. It seemed no matter what we did we had a poor co-op participation. Granted once we introduced our new product of the Allergy non-droswry we realized, aka I realized, I screwed up. We thought it was weird that we had no co-op participation at all for this brand, and then I realized that although did give it money….I forgot to check the boxes of who we wanted to participate in the co-op stuff. Talk about being so brain fried I forgot to do that. Not a good team leader move. At least we all had a decent laugh about it. Which since we were on like hour 5 of 6 (3 hours on Tuesday night and another 3 last night), it was sort of needed. Besides co-op being so annoying because no matter what we did we barely saw the needle change on it, we also found recommendations to be annoying. We tried and tried to better the recommendations with more detailers and what not. However they kept decreasing. So after a while we kind of just became overly frustrated and didn’t give it as much weight as we had originally. All our hard work though did end up paying off as we are now currently in third out of 6 teams. We were like fifth before we started last night so, go us! In fact Brianna texted me this morning to let me know. My boyfriend was a little confused why I was laughing and geekily excited. Guess some competitor-ness came out. We think the first place team may be Dan R’s group, because he supposedly a PharmSim Master. Since a lot of reading has to do with ninja’s this is clearly a good analogy. I wonder if Spotts is the hard master and Dan R is the soft master? (G.I. Joe/ninja world reference)

            So some bumps we ran into. Sales force, we tried to stay with the cap of no more than 5 people added in total, and only add one per every 5% growth increase in a particular segment. We quickly realized that if we have a lot of growth either percentage wise or across several areas we would end up surpassing the 5 people cap.  Then later on we came to another conculsion….we were comparing our sales force to the competition in the marketplace. Sounds like a smart idea. Until we realized oh they all have like 3 brands and at the time we still only had our one of Allround. When we made this realization, we also thought about cutting the sales force drastically. We stopped and thought strageticall though. What would be the hidden costs of cutting a sales force? Also, we wanted to introduce a new product, how far away were we from doing this. Turned out the next period was when we were going to introduce out new product of Allright, so avoid high costs of hiring new people to help sell our new product we kept the sales force as it was with numbers. This was good because when we received the extra budgeted money that was one less worry we had. We could instead focus on using our money for promotions and advertising. Backing up kind of for a second. I found this weir d correlation. We had one of our better periods when our advertising for Allround was around 12 million, and when we did test markets the results wouldn’t change if we altered our advertising, only if we altered our price or promotions. It made me feel like advertising didn’t matter as much as promotions and pricing. This was propabbly because Allround was the market share leader and has a huge brand awareness. So we kind of didn’t worry a lot with advertising money, but when we introduced Allright we spent a lot of time trying to nail done specifics on the advertising. Luckily our plan had a lot of that outlined with percentage of ad messages, and who we wanted to market to. We did end up playing with the numbers a bit as we entered out second period with it as we wanted to go from primary to more reminder as we had already become a bit established.

So some issues we had to overcome. Social media. We had some negative reviews, so we decided to monitor the page and respond to the comments ourselves instead of the other options of deleting, talking to legal, and what not. We ended up getting good reviews. We also decided to no reformulate, and we decided childrens cold would have the least cannibalization. In Period 4 we had to decide what to do with detailing changes. At this point we thought our decisions would impact our budget, so we left enough money to cover the cost of what to do. Our choices where to conduct clinical studies for doctors and pharmacists at $4.0 million, provide training to detailers about side effects, drug interactions, and what not at $1.0 million, update detailing materials used when talking to doctors and pharmacists at $500,000, customize pens and notepads to leave behind after a visit to doctors and pharmacists at $100,000, and add an e-detailing component to the web site for doctors and pharmacists at a cost of $1.5 million. Since we had about 4 million left over in the budget we decided the training, update materials, web site fit our budget and provided the best bang for our buck. We really liked the web decision as our company had social media already. The next special choice we had to make in a different period was that of creating marketing. This time we decided to see if it leaving no money in the budget would keep us from moving on, and it didn’t. Wish we had known that earlier. We could between street preforms, our product in a movie, a race car with our logo, a crossword puzzle, or to have and ad contest. Well we didn’t really see the benefit of street performs, a movie is cool and all but wasn’t something we saw a huge benefit with, race car was a no, and a crossword puzzle seems outdated. At least with an ad contest we could create a buzz and those people would probably be talking about how they were making a commercial for our company and brand thus promoting it further by word of mouth. Our last special incident we had to deal with was with a company saying we were price discriminating and they wants a discount our they would stop selling our product which would cause a loss of 2 million units. That seemed like a really big number until we put it into prospective. We sell over around 114 million units a period/year. So 2 million really isn’t that much. Then we thought about it, if we gave this discount it was like they were trying to black mail us, and was that something we wanted? The answer is no. Especially if other companies found out and then they started doing the same thing. Also, they would lose profit from 2 million units of our product. Not so smart! We sadly only had two options. They were give the discount, or not give the discount and risk losing their business. I would of liked a third option of pulling our business out of their stores, but that wasn’t a choice. So we went with do not give the discount.

            So after 6hours this week of focusing on this project I know we would all love a break and enjoy this labor day weekend. However, we have an assignment due next Friday on this. It is our revised memo, and also what we want to do basically for the last few periods. So we made up assignments with deadlines, will do a check in on Monday, and then hopefully hammer out this memo. It only has to be three pages, but there are lots to talk about within that page limit. So it will probably end up being very condensed and packed again. Hopefully we will earn a good grade though. We earned an 83 on our plan, which after the initial tearing apart we are all a little concerned about what the grade was going to be. So most of us were excited to see the grade be above an 80. We worked really hard on that plan, and with the amount of work we will give our revision memo hopefully we do even better. Time will tell. Here is hoping I covered everything with this blog posts. Reflection blog posts sound easy but sometimes they can be just a cause of concern as regular posts.

Week 8....Home strech

So this week will be a more in-depth look at what we have been doing in PharmSim as a group. It has been a real whirl wind.  We had to our individual situation analysis due Friday the 16^th and then our group marketing plan and strategy due on the 24^th. The individual situation analysis was killer. Not going to lie I had a bit of break down with it, but I got over it. Life is too short. I learned a lot about our company in the situation analysis. I learned that we were the market share leader and had great perception, but our numbers for sales, income and just about everything was slowly falling. Talk about some red flags. However, we have to remember though that in market that started with just 10 products now has recently gone up to 11 products. Granted not each product primarily serves the same illness, but they all draw on the same available market. So out company had a few issues, not huge issues when you put in the correct context but still so issues we needed to figure out.

                So thus we started our marketing plan and strategy which was not as intensive as the individual situation analysis, but was still rather intensive. Plus it was during a week when we all had a lot going on. Work this week had multiple events a day that involved turnovers and called for extra hours. Others in the group had orientation activities, and were moving. So we all had major stuff going on, on top of this huge project. So we dove in as much as we could, and we did a good job. Each night, those that could meet did via skype. It took a while to figure out a medium where we could meet, but skype ended up being the go to medium. We meet for hours upon hours trying to make sure we covered everything. We talked about just about everything that we could.

                Key issues were discussed and decided upon by pulling from our individual situation analysis’s and comparing which ones that popped up in all our reports, had a strong case, and from SWOT analysis. Our key issues for our company ended up being low promotion involvement and inefficient advertising, inefficient sales force allocation, declining market share (need to reposition to maintain market leader status), and option to reformulate/add line extension in upcoming periods. We figured these were good key issues that were a little bit more board as so we could address other key minor key issues.

                So our marketing plan and strategy basically centered on these key issues, and mostly on plans to increase market share and expand in upcoming periods. Jennie read the case again and noticed that there will be an option to introduce an allergy medication that is non-drowsy and had previously been a prescription only medication. Therefore no competitor in the market would have a product like this. We all decided that this would be a great opportunity for our company and brand. Especially since allergy takers make the most purchases (around 5 a year), and the markets although small are also not very penetrated as they are about 50% penetrated for all segments. We did discuss talking about reformation but decided that our product is getting great reviews the way it is and has certain competitive advantages such as high doses of almost all ingredients that can be in a multi-cold symptom. Since we don’t want to formulate we tried to figure out how to increase market share with what we got. We came to the conclusion we needed to increase recommendations which means reformatting our sales force. Well that was an issue we wanted to address. So we talked about what areas to increase, others decrease, and a plan with a cap and idea on how to increase our sales force so as to avoid where we are with an incorrect allocation of sales force.

                In increase market share we also discussed our MARKETING! Shocker right? First off, we realized we were really over spending especially with a comparison to competitors. Market share leaders do have spend a ridiculous amount to stay on top, but we all agreed our spending was a little out of line and incorrectly distributed. We wanted to increase our co-op participation. So since there has been such a low parcipation we will spend no more than $1 million each for co-op advertising, and increase attractive promotional allowances to retailers. We really tried to nail out the nitty gritty information and figure out a way to make the little things add up so that we can address our key issues and improve them before they become major problems. We really talked as much as we could out. It was great working with the group. Jennie and Briana did a lot of work. Mike and I did two parts each, and I did the final proof read. It was a good group, and I thought I had learned a lot about our company in my individual anaylsis, but I feel like I have learned even more. The annoying part is that is probably still way more to learn. I am nervous moving forward with the marketing plan and strategy as there are certain curveballs that even though you try to plan for them, sometimes they come from out or nowhere. Hopefully we have accounted for almost anything, and with percentages as bases we can respond easier than having set numbers. Time will tell, here’s keeping our fingers crossed.

Week 7

So this week will be a very short we don't have too much since we have this epic project due tonight at 11pm. I mayself have becoem crisscrossed from looking at everything and second guessing myself. Anywho...we just need to post the 5-7 metrics we think our team should be evaulated on with the Dashboard for PharmSim, and those are:

1. Market Share
2. Perception
3. Trade rating
4. Brand Awareness
5. Customer Satisfaction
6. Net income percentage

7. Stock price

That is it. See you next week!