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!

Week 6 Hump Week

So this is hump week of our 11 week course, and of course the Geico Insurance commercial with the camel in it playing on repeat in my head. For those of you who may live under a rock, please reference this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWBhP0EQ1lA

Such funny advertising. Anyways this weeks happenings are both a lot and a little. I ran PharnSim somewhere around three times before the Professor reset it for group use. I did fairly well. I really fooled around with different products and changing the ingredients to the medication. I was a lot of fun, and my stock prices usually ended up being double to triple what I started out with. Granted this isn’t the best measure of success, but I was still impressed I was able to do that. It turned out being a lot of fun.

                Then we started out group play. It was a little difficult to go through two periods in four days. Which I was really surprised about, especially since a weekend fell on those two days. For me I had planned a girls weekend with my best friends from high school who I had not seen in over a year and half, so I was very unplugged. It is funny because we realized we are changing as a target market. Target market was not really the word used, we just talked about how our conversations had changed from looking to go out to different clubs to being more home bodies and talks of wedding stuff. (one my friends, her sister is engaged and is planning everything) We even commented how on facebook how everyone is either getting married or having a kid. Which reminded me of how there are very different target markets and there those that are young people, young families, and what not like in PharmSim. Anyways, I have become a bit off point. We were able to complete the two PharmSim periods as a group. We realized as a group after the first period, that we needed to be more specific with what we wanted to change in the simulation. The second round I was able to chat directly with a group member we were able to figure out a lot of things of the details for the next period. We had to figure out a way to cut our budget as we started off the period in a negative. We looked and realized that our advertising was much more than anyone else. So we cut it enough were we would still be leaders in advertising but yet mostly be out the red for the period with our budget. We did a few other adjustments, and by the end we ended up being in the plus by .7 million. So we decided to just spilt the money in promotions between coupons and trial sizes.

                Drucker came back this week in our reading. I was elated as you can imagine. We had to read chapters 10-14.Basically this was an entire section of the book titled “Drucker’s Marketing Strategy”. Chapter 10 was really eye opening. It was all about how we create the future, and certain parts of if can actually be foreseen. Now Drucker didn’t have a purple room where he consulted a crystal ball or anything, but rather he looked through the “window”.  What is meant by looking through the window is that we need to be observant of what is happening around us. Events that are happening now are going to have ripple effect on the future. Think of the baby boomer, as they go through the life cycle of life a company would have to change to accommodate everything. They are all in the process of retiring so adult living properties would become popular and maybe a good investment, or anything else that that they may like. Even walkers and canes may need to up their production to meet the demand that will be coming its way. However, creating the future can be risky especially certain industries. What a company must do is answer four questions when trying to create the future. These four questions according to Drucker are:

1.       What opportunities does the company want to pursue, and what risks is it willing and able to accept?

2.       What are the scope and structure of the organization’s strategy, including the right balance among such aspects as specialization, diversification, and integration?

3.       What are considered acceptable trade-offs for a company between time and money and between in-house execution and using a merger, acquisition, joint venture, or some external means to reach its objectives and attain its goals?

4.       What is the organizational structure appropriate to the company’s economic realities, the opportunities, and it performance expectations?

It is important that companies always be evaluating themselves, their markets, their product ventures, and coming up with contingency plans. To do this a company must know it’s specific purpose and its mission.

                If a company does not know what its business is then it will fail, especially with marketing. Without definition the business could end up spending time, money, and resources on projects that are in apporiobate instead of opportunities that are better suited. Knowing what your business is will help you determine where to apply your business successfully. Once a business knows what it is there must be commitment. Commitment is huge! It proves how important the goal is and are most likely to go more all out for reaching the goal than if it is down played and considered not important. Think of a big game against your rival. You are more likely to go all out verse a game that you know you are going to win against the opponent. Commitment also shows that the leader will not quit. If a leader will not quit then people will follow. When I recruit I often am asked the question if the head coach is going anywhere, and I often tell recruits that she is not as she has a family here and her husband works in the same department. I see this wave of relief on recruits when I tell them this, especially those that have gone through several coaches in their high school career. They want a committed leader that won’t quit. When making up a strategy it most have three aspects. These are physical resources, intelligence or knowledge, and have the correct attitude or moral values. These three aspects must work together for success. There are five proven techniques that will help apply commitment to marketing as it is very important. These five techniques are”

1.       Think through the goals until they are clear and definite

2.       Make a public commitment

3.       Promote your goals and objectives

4.       Expect and deal with the dragons (obstacles)

5.       Adjust your marketing strategy and tactics but not the objectives

Basically it comes down to really know the company, what direction it needs to be headed, accounting for as much as possible that could go wrong, and keep reviewing everything periodically.

                Marketing will always be impacted by what is going on in the world. Some changes will have more weight than others but there are five certainties that every marketing strategy must take into account in the foreseeable future and those are:

1.       The collapsing birthrate in the developed world

2.       Shifts in the distribution of disposable income

3.       New definitions of performance in an organization

4.       Global competitiveness

5.       The growing incongruence between economic globalization and political splintering

When making a marketing strategy a marketer must consider the 4P’s as well as the environmental or situational variables, and then take these five certainties into account.

                What a company must also do is not be afraid of abandoning profitable products. Listen everything has a lifecycle, that was one of the main lesson from Lion King was it not? The whole circle of life thing. Sometimes a profitable product just is not profitable any more. According to Drucker every three years an organization should challenge everything it is about, their products, and just everything to figure out if they would still be doing what they were doing if they were already doing do it. Also, abandonment should be considered an opportunity. When a project is abandoned then resources can be redirected and a new successful product or service can be the champion of the company. Once a product or services is determined to be abandoned a company should come up with a plan. The “how” to abandon is just as important the “what” and should be treated with the same respect. A company must come up with a plane regarding the resources, tools, money, and everything that went to the product and figure out how to redistribute it or how to abandon it.

 

                The last thing that we read about with Drucker was how selling and marketing and could even be considered adversarial. It is often believe that good selling can overcome bad marketing. However, marketing when done correctly can actually help enhance selling at a fraction of the effort. Good marketing can help sellers target the correct market to sell too, verse trying to sell ice to an eskmo. To get back on track Drucker suggests looking at three points:

1.       Strategy first

2.       Strategy determines tactics

3.       Good tactics are not only complementary to each other but they are synergistic

Strategy of a company is really important and it will help determine where a company will go and how to not only market but also sell. When marketing and selling work together on tactics, they will be unstoppable. However if they remain adversarial the company will not reach its full potential. Alright that is all for now.

 

Week Five

Hello All! So this week has been interesting. I went through an entire session of PharmSim. I think I did pretty well. I tried to launch a new product during some rounds, but my stock kept dropping for the next couple of rounds. Also, I had a hard time trying to split my money between both products, so I dropped my product. As soon as I did, my stock price started increasing.

One topic we read about was buying behavior of consumers and customers. Consumers make decisions in one of three categories. The different categories are nominal, limited, and extended. Each one has different levels of purchase involvement. Since consumer behavior cannot be neatly tied into a specific category, the reading talked about how it is better to think of it a scale. Sort of like the spectrum of light scale. Here I have demonstrated this scale from the scale that is used from the spectrum of light. (Time to add some color to my blog)

Purchase involvement on a product is basically how much time a consumer or customer spends thinking about purchasing the product. The larger the item, how many risks involved with making the wrong purchase, and the product’s significance to the consumer’s life are just some of the reasons that there would be a high involvement in regards to purchasing a decision. Right now I have a high purchase involvement with buying a kitchen table. We currently have one from my boyfriend’s family. It is the table that everyone gets when they first move into a place, and then return once they buy their own. We live in a very small one bedroom apartment, so we need maximize on space while staying in small budget. So we have been looking at different tables that could help us. We found this almost perfect one at Costco. It was only $200 which is very much within our budget, and it has “bookcase” like legs. Kind of like this one:

However, as much as it maximizes storage and space, it also is about a foot longer than we like, because if we buy it then only one person can be in the kitchen at a time. We found another table we like where it is expandable, but since my boyfriend is going back to school and I am in grad school we will need a table that is sturdy and can hold all out books and laptops. My books are pretty light, but he is going for civil engineering technology and I really rather doubt his books will be light. Since we can’t find anything that meets both our size and budget requirements, we have turned to pinterest. We have found out how people have made their own project tables from cubicle book cases. So we have researched where to get bookcases, what size we want, when to purchase (tax free weekend on August 10^th), and how to do this table. Turns out, right now and knock on wood, that if we make this table we could end up only spending about $100. Good thing my boyfriend is in construction. If he was not then we would be doing something else.

Nominal decision making is the one where you think the least when buying a product or have the least involvement when making a decision. For example, you need a bottle of water at work you go to the vending machine and get one. The interesting part about nominal decisions is that a decision about a product could of once had a more involved decision making process, but if you really liked the product and became brand loyal, then you would just repurchase without a lot of involvement. Think of your cellphone. You most likely did a lot of research on the perfect one, and when it came to upgrade you may have gotten your phone that was upgraded. I know my iPhone is due for an upgrade soon, and I will most likely just upgrade to the iPhone 5 from my iPhone 4. I know it, have been satisfied, and am brand loyal to this company and product. When I bought a new computer, I just bought another HP because my last one had been so great. I knew right off the bat I wanted another HP laptop.

Limited decision making is the middle of the road in the spectrum. It is a little more extensive than simple, but nowhere near that of extended decision making. The way it was described is sort of as if there is only one decision factor or very few that go into a consumer or customer buying a product. So it could be quality, product availability, style, price, color, it could be anything. It is the job of the marketer to figure out what is the leading decision maker and market it to that.

Extended decision making is very in-depth. A customer or consumer considers both internal but also mostly a lot of researched external alternative. My table example is probably a good example, or that of buying a house, or car. This is also where post purchase dissonance comes into play. Have you ever made a purchase and regretted it somehow? If a purchase has one of these four factors the most likely you feel a strong post-purchase dissonance:

1.       The decision’s permanence

2.       The cost of the decision

3.       The importance of the decision in your life

4.       The difficulty of choosing between options

I myself go through post-purchase dissonance whenever I make a high involvement/extended decision. I took a trip to England for Christmas to visit my sister, and there have been several times where I wish hadn’t because I wish I still had the money. However, I had a great time and all I had to do was pay for the plane ticket. Or when I bought my new computer. My other one worked, but had power cord socket had issues and it was also 6 years old. Since I was starting graduate school I didn’t want to be in the middle of huge a product and my computer die. So I bought a new one. There are times that I wish I hadn’t bought it, but then I remind myself it was for bettering my education. Ways companies can avoid this is by using advertisements that highlight how great their product is get new customers and reassure those that have purchased. Companies also will make direct contact with the customers after they buy to thank them, and follow up on satisfaction.

                What are influences on customer/consumer behavior? Well external factors are huge, they consist of culture, values, social class, reference groups, and opinion-leaders. We have already talked about culture and values in other blog posts. Social class is where a customer/consumer is categorized in society based on education, income, and occupation. Reference groups are groups that influence behavior in a certain situation. So when I worked at a different company, everyone was into Lululemon. So that influenced me to start buying there so I could better fit in. I can’t afford much, but I can afford headbands! And head bands were a big thing at my work (I was an Assistant Women’s Lacrosse Coach in New Hampshire). So boom! When I needed a head band that is where I got it.

Opinion leaders are people who constantly research product and brand specific  information and share what they find with others. I have a friend who always has the newest technological gadgets. So whenever I look into purchasing a new gadget, and by this time it is not new, I tap into his expertise. He is my opinion leader when it comes technological gadgets.

                Sometimes marketing can be different due to what a company does business with. You maybe asking yourself what not who? Well this is because some companies sell business to business (B2B), and not necessarily business to consumer (B2C). There are several difference in business marketing. They are the individual roles of the buying center, evaluative criteria, buying situations, business ethics, and customer service. A buying center is made up the person who suggests the company to buy from (initiator), the people who decide what is needed (influencer or evaluator), the people who filter unwanted companies (gatekeepers), and those that decide (decider), purchase (purchaser), and use the product (user). Most evaluative criteria for sales has to with quality of the item, the service of the company that provides the item, and the price of the item. Very similar to how general consumer make decisions on products. Buying situations can be a new buy which is a first time buy, straight rebuy which is the same exact order as last time, or modified rebuy which the customer makes a few changes to the order. Business ethics is well sort of self-explanatory. Who wants to do business with an unethical company? Of course customer service is huge when dealing with business to business marketing.

                We also talked about market segmentation. There are five ways to segment a market. They are geographic, demographics, psychographics, benefits sought, and usage rate. Geographic segmentation if when a market is broken down into sections by climate, density, market size, world or states. So you would want to sell most of your snow shovels in New England where is a ton of snow in the winter and not in the south where there is little to no snow. Demographic segmentation is based on age, income, gender, ethnic background, and family life cycle. Psychographic segmentation is based on personality, motives, and lifestyles. Benefit segmentation is based on segmenting groups by the benefits that the consumer/customer  using the product or service. Usage-rate segmentation is based on how much of the product a customer uses or consumes. Usage-rate segmentation generally has the 80/20 Principle associated with it. The 80/20 rule is that the 20% of your customers make up 80% of the demand for a product or service.

                Our chalk talk this week was based on benefit ladders. Every product has benefits that it provides. The example used in the chalk talk was that of a drill. The benefit of drill is that it makes the holes you want. Benefits have physical attributes, economic benefits, intangible attributes that are perceived or psychological, and emotional benefits. The ladder’s first step is product benefits (what are the characteristics, features, specific measurable of the product), then functional benefits (what does the product actually do for the customer, what is the unique value of the product), and followed by emotional benefits (what are the dominant feelings produce by or associated with the possession of or use of the product). For our PharmSim application one could construct a benefit ladder for the product Allround. The product benefits is the product helps people with their cold symptoms through a certain make up of chemicals/ingredients. The functional benefits are that relieves cough, congestion, and other cold symptoms. Lastly, the emotional benefit of Allround is that it is a trusted brand name product verse a generic brand.

                When I purchase OTC cold remedies I look for the medication that I am most familiar with and that offers the benefits. I grew up on Robitussin. It tastes AWEFUL! In fact I know I am really sick if the thought of “oh this stuff isn’t too bad” enters my mind. When I go shopping for cold medication I look for the kind of Robitussin that has most of my symptoms listed that it helps.  My boyfriend makes decisions based on what symptoms he has and what knows is a good brand. With OTC Cold medications there isn’t much cognitive dissonance because I am so sick I can’t think.

                Our company makes B2B purchasing decisions. We buy skirts and products from other companies. We base our purchase decisions on where we have ordered from before, price, budget, and urgency of need. Our budgets have been shrinking each year, so that has forced us to look at other vendors. We have tried to avoid this with our skirts as the colors have to be the exact same, and sometimes companies have a different tint to their colored products. But for work shirts we have looked for cheaper places, or even the clips we need for our tables. We don’t experience much cogitative dissonance with events, or at least with my experience. Most groups want to come back. Those who may not have liked their event here though we try to figure out why, and make notes for next year if they decide to come back.

Ok so I think this shall be it. Sorry for the long post. Hope you found it informative.