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.