Week 9

This week we read an article about marketing metrics, "Managing the Marketing Metrics Portfolio". The article reviews different metrics that can be used to measure the efficiency of your marketing plan. Every company has a different mission and a different strategy, the metrics used must be in line with your mission and strategy. A company must understand their position in the market before determining their metrics. For example, a start up company will have different metrics than a mature company. The start up will need to adjust their metrics after a couple of years as their strategy will have changed. We can apply the concepts in the article to the Pharmasim simulation we are currently working on. In Pharmasim, it is important to understand who your customers are and what your position is in the market. Allround is the market leader is over the counter cold medicines so using market share as a metric would make sense. After working on the marketing plan for Pharmasim my team has decided to implement a premium pricing strategy. With this strategy in place we will not look at units sales for our metrics but instead use gross margin. We were operating over capacity which increased out costs of goods sold and hurt our gross margin. Another team might use different metrics to determine their efficiency.

Managing the Allstar Brands company in Pharmasim has been an interesting experience so far. As a team, Justin and I are working well together. The first few periods did not yield the results we were expecting. The biggest problem we had was that we did not have a defined pricing strategy at the beginning of the simulation and kept our price low. This resulted in high unit sales but our net income was not impressive at all. The high number of unit sales caused us to run over capacity and raised our costs of goods sold. After completing the situation analysis and marketing plan we have determine a better strategy for the upcoming periods. Justin and I realized what issues we were having and are on the same page about the decision we need to make in the future periods. We are hoping that this new strategy will help us improve on our metrics.

This week we were also asked to review the blogs of three other classmates. I decided to review Marty's blog first. I have been reading his blog every once in a while and like how he related class to working for Vermont Yankee. Some industries, like Marty's and mine working in construction do not always have a strong connection to Marketing. Justin also does a great job connecting college football to marketing. I liked Marty's blog because it is very detailed. He does a great job of connecting the various class assigned articles and outside articles to the class topics. Next I reviewed Andrew's blog. I liked that Andrew uses outside examples, especially the example of the car dealership with a niche market and their strategy. Andrew's blog was easy to read. Last, I review Ahmed's blog. Ahmed uses pictures and charts that relate to his posts that help explain what is going on. I thought that Ahmed's blog flowed very nicely through each of his posts and was quite detailed.

I thing I though of this wee while working on the marketing plan was distribution channels. Working in construction we do not have a product that goes through various distribution channels. However, we do have different channels that our submital process needs to go through. For various parts of the project we are required to submit cut sheets or shop drawing to the architect or engineer. The process starts with the subcontractor who is required to submit the cut sheets or shop drawings to us. These are then reviewed by the superintendents and project managers. The next phase is submitting them to the architect/engineer for review. The submitals are either returned as approved, rejected or more information needed. If a submital is approved the part is order and if its reject a new submital is required. These submitals need to through various channels before they are brought on site and installed.