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.