Month: April 2013

Working on the marketing assignment throughout the semester was an interesting experience as we were applying our knowledge to the real-world scenario.

Managing the group dynamics and our different characters proved to be sometimes challenging but the overall experience was good. By setting group rules and assessing each person skills we were able to distribute the tasks in optimal way, taking advantage of our strengths and mitigating our weaknesses.

Final, video assignment was a challenging wrap-up of what we’ve learnt during the course. We were free to use any kind of tools. We’ve practiced group brainstorming on the ideas and recommendation, critical thinking; finally, we created a script for our video, artistic concept of the video and created a final product. It took us much more time that a “usual” presentation, however, it was interesting to reach out and practice the use new technologies – video and voice editing. I had some previous experience but it was the first time I was required to do for a course.

Through the assignment I’ve developed my group-work skills and reflected a lot about the process. If I was to change something, I would express my expectations to the group in a clearer way at the beginning of our project and try to set clearer goals for each meeting to make them more productive.

The course was very interesting overall. My top takeaway is that marketing is not about pushing things to the customers, but rather finding the right audience and providing them with valuable information on a product that they need, thus building long-term relationships and sustainable market for the company. Gaining literacy in some marketing terms and strategies as well as seeing marketing strategy as a set of interconnected and coherent actions was very valuable and will help me on my way to better understand marketing and its role in business.

Recently, I came across Anmol’s blogpost “Innovation in the Soap Industry – Is it really innovation?” and really appreciated his analysis and reality check approach.

Detergent are in mature product category therefore companies try to differentiate themselves from one another claiming “innovation” in every single product, being 3in1, 10in1, more concentrated or capsules instead of powder of liquid.
As Anmol suggest, the latter strategy had a big impact on the industry. The reason behind is that it provides better consumer experience – capsules avoid overuse of product, are easy to apply etc.

I agree with Anmol than rather than competing on the products features producers should focus on making their products more user-friendly; for exemple offering multi-dosage capsules of machine built-in systems would be one way of creating real value to customers by saving their time and energy. This kind of innovation would also likely create new product category (rather that keep competing in the mature category) and increase margins, unlike concentrating current detergents.