Anmol Gupta's Blog

Your experience with the marketing plan assignment?

The overall experience was very good. It was a great learning opportunity and a window into how real world marketing actually works. That being said, I feel we only touched the surface of something much more deeper.

What did you learn about teams, yourself and marketing?

Not only with this subject, I think I realized the most efficient meetings are the small five minute meetings where we divide the tasks, do them individually and then integrate it all together; like the divide and conquer algorithm used in computer science. Though this only works when all the team members are committed in doing their best work.

I used to think of marketing as a very small, almost insignificant part of the company; but after doing this course, and taking four months to scratch the surface of Business to Conusmer marketing, I realized that there is a lot more to marketing than what it initially seemed like.

What skills did you enhance or develop? Why?

Definitely blogging. Even asking me to blog just six times over a period of four months has definitely helped my apprehension towards blogging. The first few blogs took a long time to think and write, but over time I can see myself becoming more confident with my thoughts.

What would you do differently next time?

One thing which I would have loved to see in the assignment was leveraging the fact that departments don’t work in isolation. My entire project was assuming the marketing department has unlimited resources, time, money etc. and it would have been better if were asked to think about these before recommending a strategy.

The other part is to not only introduce us to B2C marketing, rather give us an introduction for the different permutations of marketing there are like B2B, C2C and even C2B.

What are your top takeaways?

The biggest takeaway which I learned was that every company is your competitor in some form. That was a whole new idea to think about it, and I think that will stick with me for a very long time to come.

There was a recent article in the WSJ where manufacturers were claiming that the innovation behind releasing capsules was ruining the industry. The manufacturers suggested that making more concentrated solutions as a way of innovating the product is better for all manufacturers rather than a single manufacturer.

My concern is that making a more concentrated solution isn’t innovation; the capsules represented innovation. Companies in the soap industry need to understand that when they market something as innovative, it truly is innovative. The real innovation was based on the changing from liquid to capsules, the fake innovation was making it more concentrated, and then offer bigger cartons so people not only pay more for more; but also use the same amount that they are normally used to.

Rather than complain on the low margins, the manufacturers should further investigate how to better innovate their product to ensure it is easier for the consumers to use the product. Manufacturers should work with consumers to find out what are they doing wrong; and the only bad thing which manufacturers are doing right now is the refusal to accept this innovation in product.

The more worrying thing for the manufacturers is that after innovating, P&G managed to increase their margins significantly, so that leads me to believe that is true innovation; creating a product, removing your competition and increasing your margins for a commodity where replacement options are available in many forms

What manufacturers need to do now is to first of all replicate the product, and focus on making the lives of others easier than what it already is today.

From my limited experience in dealing with laundromats, have companies considered partnering up with a washing machine and letting their solution come out automatically depending on the load? That would for me be true innovation; as I no longer have to worry about how much detergent to put in, that is taken care by the washing machine in association with a laundry detergent manufacturer.

Source: http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323916304578400521297972496.html?mod=WSJPRO_hpp_LEFTTopStories

I was just reading an article which ironically was a required reading for the class I am writing blog posts for; Commerce 296. The article mentioned how the Nexus tablets and Amazon tablets are being sold at a price where they are just breakeven with the costs, whereas, the iPad Mini is well above the cost price for Apple. This leads me to think something might be going on; Apple is focusing on hardware, whereas Amazon/Google is focusing on software.

What I mean by this is that Apple is primarily making money from its application store and their hardware sales. Google is getting their money from the service aspect, where people are using the service and thats where they are making the money, like from advertisements. I believe that the Google way is the way of the future, and we have already seen something more drastic what I believe will lead the way into the future.

Today a basic version which I have seen involves the Amazon Kindle Fire. That tablet can be bought with advertisements for a lower price than without advertisements. It is also my understanding that you can pay the difference to remove those advertisements. This might lead to a way of segregating users based on the device and likewise their income levels.

I believe that tomorrows tablets will be sold at below cost, and the money will be based off the future use of the software. The advertisements which are a key source of revenue would be based off which tablet you bought; the people who bought the more powerful tablets would probably have a greater income level, and thus their advertisements would be suited for them, whereas those who bought a really cheap tablet, have probably a lower income level, they will have advertisements suited to them. All of this will of course be used with the massive amount of data which Google has; to really bring advertisements which are important to me.

With Google unveiling its new Chromebook, the question has to be raised if Google can also dominate the laptop industry as well. With Android taking a large share of the mobile market, it might be natural to many users to also buy a Google Laptop rather than a Mac or Windows laptop.

Many users of the computing ecosystem use two different operating systems for their notebooks and their phones. I don’t think there would be many people carrying both a laptop and a phone from the same operating system. If Google can demonstrate that a notebook can be a natural extension from their smartphone (which I strongly feel it is right now), then users might feel more comfortable in an environment they have grown up in; a mobile environment.

For people who first learned how to use their phones, and then their notebooks, they might find learning to use the Chromebook to be very easy, as it is probably an extension of the Android smartphone. This might cause a long term issue for Windows, as their products wouldn’t work well with the entire ecosystem of products, rather it will be used in isolation, and people will struggle to use two different environments smoothly.

The chromebook itself is also very cheap, and it might make an interesting market for the developing world. People there might never even see a windows laptop, but they might have well played with a chromebook since the base version is so cheap. This means that the worlds biggest markets in the future may never have even used something which is so common now, rather they would be using something which is much more affordable and natural to them instead of learning how to use another operating system.

I believe this represents a huge marketing opportunity for Google, its just that they need to realize what they have right now to market it properly.

With the launch of the Blackberry Z10, the company looks to be trying everything. They have placed advertisements in Super Bowl, they have garnered positive reviews of their products and they finally seem like having a product that can compete in the market. In all this, I strongly believe they have missed out one key segment, software engineers.

Blackberry can’t forget marketing to them as well, part of the success of the iPhone, Android and even to a certain extent Windows Phone 8 is the presence of applications. No ecosystem is functional on its own without its applications – imagine using Android or your iPhone without any of the applications which you installed, which will probably hold true for Blackberry as well.

Blackberry will have to not only convince the consumers that the new phone is perfect for them, but they would also need to convince the software engineers to create applications for their ecosystem. Blackberry did have one program for them, that is to port their current applications to work with the new operating system of Blackberry but that definitely isn’t enough. It seemed to be a 36 hour process which involved eventually getting $100 if ported successfully and a chance to win a device.

My issue with such a program is that it isn’t encouraging new ideas, it is existing older ideas into a new platform. I feel Blackberry should experiment with their developers and encourage them to introduce new ideas, which might not have previously been seen in the market before. In doing so, Blackberry will be taking a huge risk, but with the number of people who always have innovative ideas, Blackberry might just come across an idea which changes their product completely.

The key message here is of course, with any new platform, it isn’t just sufficient to target the consumers. For the system to work, it also needs the applications which others bring in, and asking people to do that over multiple Port-A-Thons over 36 hours, only seems like a half solution to a much bigger problem.

The recent events of the grounding of Boeing’s newest commercial airliner has brought out some interesting ethical implications. The reason for the grounding was the lithium ion batteries onboard the airplane, which passed the initial inspection by the FAA – the regulatory authorities who ensure that all planes are safe to fly. In a sense, you could assume that the FAA was marketing Boeing’s 787 as a plane which is safe to fly, and one of the ways they tested the airplane creates some ethical issues.

The FAA accepted the test results from Boeing directly, which probably meant that there was no external investigation about the safety of the aircraft. When the FAA marketed this as being a safe plane, it raised questions on the credibility of the test results, because the plane obviously wasn’t as safe as they had previously thought. This does raise the intriguing question of whether this should have at all been permitted that an airliners safety is done by the manufacturer as well, as they have an incentive to cheat, and why did the FAA accept these test results? I’m sure this is more of a precautionary move, but how many other planes are there flying where both the tests and results were done by the manufacturer, and what sort of conflict of interest is arising in these transactions?

Not a whole lot to be honest with you. Maybe I am too young to understand the reasons for this class, but I found a lot of things to be very suited for finance, accounting and marketing etc. but not a lot towards students in other fields. I was told to wear a suit for all my interviews as you never want to be under-dressed, but it is a known fact that in fields where I want to end up going, or industries which I want to work in potentially in the future, a suit could go against you. I know my capabilities very well, and I thought that maybe if I were to redo my resume to fit the standards of Commerce 299, I would realize the magnitude of my capabilities, rather it had an opposing effect making me realize what I could have done which I didn’t do. And not to mention now, whenever I go to any company’s info session, what I generally find is people with the exact same structure as my resume, I always thought that you have to be different from everyone else, but when the first thing they see is just another resume of the same structure, it becomes that much harder for you to look different.

There were things I learnt in Commerce 299 which I am sure will be helpful in the future, but I can’t say a lot of things I learnt about myself in the course.

A question was recently asked, which one person who has inspired you the most? I thought a long time about that question, and came to the conclusion that there has been no one who has inspired me in my life. I have never looked at someone in admiration, and think I want to be them. I admire a lot of people, my family, friends, most of my teachers and most of my professors, some of whom I admire more than others. These people have also inspired me, again some more than others, but I can’t point to one single person and suggest that he or she inspired me to become what I am today.

I have always followed my own way of thinking, but let’s face it, that thinking would have certainly been influenced by everyone who I have met. I don’t think anyone had a serious impact on my way of thinking. Sometimes I find people get influenced by celebrities of some sort in their own respective fields, but I have never really looked at one person and thought, I want to be like them. My parents certainly have had a massive influence over myself, but that is also true with most people, and also I can’t really single out one of my parents, both have had an equally positive influence over me. Really, many have influenced me, but I don’t think there will be the one person who I will be influenced by the most.

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