| April
24 | |
Please see Reviews of Books, Journals and
Websites for a list of the items class members chose
to work on.
|
| March 20 (First Day of Spring) | |
Please see Projects and Teams for
the Spring Semester for a list of what folks in the class are
working on.
|
| March 1 | |
Please see A Framework for Social
Marketing Programs for some notes about applying marketing concepts to
social marketing.
|
| Feb. 28 | |
Please see Questions about the Patterns
of Demand and Their Underlying Causes.
|
| Feb. 21 | |
Please see What's New for a
description of the class activity for today. Essentially, you are asked
to analyze an organization with a web presence from a marketing
perspective. Some useful Case Analysis questions are:
- What's the current situation? Who are the customers and the
markets that the organization seems to be targeting?
- Is there evidence of strategic planning by the organization? What is
it? What are the broad goals and more specific objectives?
- Can you detect how the organization is segmenting its markets?
- What is the organization's current distribution system?
- What kind of promotional activities is it using?
- Who are the competitors?
- What environmental factors are relevant? What is going on that's
supportive? What problems might need to be overcome?
- What do you see as the current market issues for the organization? Do
you have any recommendations for the top brass?
|
| Feb. 16 | |
A good link to information about the semantic differential, mentioned
in Chapter 6, is Osgood's
semantic differential. You will have to use the Om index to take you
to the particular link. If we do our exercise we may use this set of
ten adjective
pairs or we can make up our own, for example:
pleasant - unpleasant
hard - soft
afraid - unafraid
valuable - worthless
love - hate
fast - slow
boring - interesting
relevant - irrelevant
exciting - dull
appealing - unappealing
fascinating - mundane
not needed - needed
|
| Feb. 15 | |
Please see "How Competitive Forces Shape
Strategy," for some notes taken from Michael Porter. Our speaker,
John MacMullen mentioned some of Porter's concepts in his discussion of
competitive intelligence and I thought it might be useful to get a bit
more of the flavor of Porter's ideas.
On Wednesday, Feb. 16, we will be talking about Positioning. If we have
time I have an exercise we might do using the agencies presenting at the
Career Fair.
|
| Feb. 2 | |
Please see Designation of Groups and Market
Audit Exercise.
|
| Jan. 24 | : |
We discussed the continuum from products to services and back again
last week. Today we'll formalize the distinction between products and
services and talk a bit about some components we might consider in an
"integrated service management approach."
First some basic differences between products and services:
- Customers do not own services.
- The delivery of a service is the delivery of an intangible; it's a
performance.
- Customers are more involved in the production of a service.
- Other people may form part of the service (Ex., other customers on a
bus or in a library or computer lab).
- There is greater variability in operational inputs and outputs --
harder to offer consistency and to control quality.
- Many services are difficult for customers to evaluate -- Services may
emphasize "experience attributes" (like durability, quietness, personal
treatment) or "credence attributes" (like surgery, technical work).
- Typically inventories are absence -- services are perishable, can't be
saved.
- Time is relatively more important as most services are delivered in
real time with customers physically present.
- Delivery systems may involve both electronic and physical channels.
When we talk about marketing products, we address the 4 Ps: product,
price, place, and promotion. Christopher Lovelock, another marketing guru
who has written a number of textbooks often focused on service marketing,
offers the 8Ps of integrated service management -- that is, the eight
kinds of decisions managers have to make when marketing services. They
are:
- Product elements -- all the components of the service
performance
that create value for customers.
- Place and time -- management deicsions about when, where, and
how to
deliver services to customers.
- Process -- the steps that need to occur in a defined sequence
to deliver the service.
- Productivity and quality -- Productivity is how efficiently
service inputs are transformed into outputs that add value for
customers. Quality is the degree to which a service satisfies customers
by meeting their needs, wants, and expectations (the three are
different).
- People - Personnel (and sometimes other customers) who are
involved in service production.
- Promotion and education -- All the communication activities and
incentives designed to build customer preference for a specific service or
service provider.
- Physical evidence -- Visual or other tangible clues that
provide evidence of service quality.
- Price and other costs of service -- Expenditures of money,
time, and effort that customers incur in purchasing and consuming
services.
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