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.