Week 8 - Marketing Stategy

This week we read about Drucker's ideas on marketing strategy. One of his ideas about strategy was that it is the customer who ultimately determines marketing decisions and what a business is because they are the ones who pay for the goods or services. I agree with Drucker's suggestion because a business needs to understand their customers to be successful. If a business understands their customers to will adjust their marketing strategy and pricing strategy to fit their customers needs. A business that does not make decisions based on their customer's needs has less of a chance of being successful. Working in the construction industry I come across different customers with different needs. We do a variety of work and based on the customers needs we adjust out strategy. We have superintendents with different experiences and knowledge of the industry who might be better suited for one project of the other. We adjust our strategy based on the customers needs just as Drucker suggested.

Another one of Drucker's suggestions was about predicting the future. He said that the purpose of a strategic analysis was not to predict the future. If the strategic analysis, an analysis of historical data, is not used to predict the future what is it for? Drucker said that its purpose was to give direction to determine the strategy to reach their goals. Past purchasing habits can be used in conjunction with know economical information to help predict the future. There are 5 certainties that can help a strategist predict the future. Those are:

1) The birthrate in the developing world
2) Shifts in the distribution of disposable income
3) New definition of performance in an organization
4) Global competitiveness
5) The growing incongruence between economic globalization and political splintering.

Theses certainties, which are events that have already occurred and are know in the future, will not tell businesses what they need to do but can help them predict their future markets.

Pharmasim
This past week we finished making the decision for the first three periods of Pharmasim. We then developed our own strategic analysis of Allstar Brands. Completing the strategic analysis has been helpful to understand how our past decision affect our sales, market share, net income, etc. We have been asked to evaluate our performance against the performance of other teams in class. Pharmasim has various reports to complete the evaluation. Some of the reports that should be used include sales revenue, market share and profitability and unit sales.

Other Blogs
The firs blog I read was Alexis'. Her blog was interesting because she covers everything we do in class plus has other posts about marketing. One post that I really like was the two ads in one. I had not seen that advertisement before and its quite interesting. The ad shows 2 different images, one that kids can see and one that adults see based on your height. This is an interesting way of advertising to 2 different markets at once. Anther aspect of Alexis' blog that I enjoyed was her answering her own questions for the week. Its a great way to help yourself understand the material.

The next blog that I read was David's. I like David use of the Dilbert comic and its connection to the class and marketing. David has his weekly blog posts broken into separate posts. It was really easy to follow and read. David goes into great detail about each of the topic from class and talks a lot about the Pharmasim simulation. He also incorporate pictures into his blog to relate to his posts. One post that I like was the ranch dressing with the new formula. It interesting how something like that might not catch your attention everyday but when your learning about it in class is right there. It show that the decision we are making in Pharmasim are made by companies everyday.

The last blog I read was Christine's. I how Christine goes into great detail about Pharmasim, the first trail period and how they came to make their decisions in the first 3 periods of team work. Her team set their goals from the beginning and worked toward them. She also noted that the goals were flexible and might need to change after a couple of periods. Christine used interesting titles for each weeks posts instead of just titling it the week number. I liked in the pricing strategies post she related the strategies that we had been talking about to real life situations.

Its always interesting to read the blogs of other classmates to see how they are understanding the information from class and how they have worked on Pharmasim.