Before taking Comm 296, my understanding of the word ”marketing” was like a group of people sitting in a meeting room and designing a big, colorful poster of one of their new products —- Now, I know it is just part of advertising instead of the whole term of marketing.

Today, I think marketing is more likely a plan of the company’s future. Every single company, big or small, lives on a certain market or markets. Good businesses see a step ahead, and this is implemented, from my view, by marketing. A current profitable product does not mean the company could relay on it for a long time. Sometimes it’s even deceptive. I got my own experience of the farmers in my hometown. They used to grow rice in a small scare. In 2010, the economic was recovering from the 2009 depression, so the price of rice start to grow up as well. The farmers saw it as a solid trend that rice could continue to be profitable for them. Everyone start to grow rice. They reclaimed the citrus land, the soybeans grand, to grow rice. In 2011, due to the impact of import rice to the market. Their rice was unsalable and the farmers suffer a serious lost.

If they could imply some marketing knowledge and research on the market trend, such suffer might be avoidable. The marketing plan is broken down into various components—what product should be invested on (in this case, the most important one), how much it should cost, where and how it will be promoted, and how it will get to the consumer.

After all, I do leaned some useful, proactive aspects in this course. And thank Ms. Tamar for her professional presentations.

“We are team 7!!”I would say I appreciate all of my marketing teammates in this semester. We worked together for 3 insightful marketing assignments. Particularly, we spent tones of time working on the Video project, and we enjoyed it. For me, it was a great learning opportunity for not only marketing research but also knowledge on media production as well as how to work as a team.

I learned that a clear outline has to be set up before pursuing any big progress. That was our first time touching video production. At first, we didn’t even know how to save the work! There were so much unknowns and crossroads: form of expression, content, even whether making video first or audio. To solve all of these problems, we decided to have a meeting before getting started.  On the meeting, we achieved consensus that an outline, in writing, should be firstly done before we move on to the technique things. We assigned work to each group member so that everyone could bring his or her ideas about the content. We hoped by doing that we did not need to worry about what to say but only how to show.

I learned to compromise. We did have so many difficulties creating that video. One was that I preferred more drawing appear in the video because I thought drawing was the easiest way to express our various ideas especially when we did not have any technique background. Yet one my teammate thought drawing tended to be boring. He preferred clipping existing video online and scream recording. We could not convince each other but we decide to mix the two methods and continually check the victual effects at every step.

Next time, if we got a chance to do another marketing video, I would make use of more the equipment and technical support from CLC. They had great resources available but we just don’t know how to use them. We did not use the “E-being” very much, and we did not use a lot of functions in the software, which I believe could make the video amazing.  A great marketer, not only for producing videos but also in other marketing activities in general, like advertising, should know how to make use of our resources effectively. Mr. Jim Connolly brought this insight to me in his blog titled “What do you do with your resources” http://jimsmarketingblog.com/2013/03/30/what-do-you-do-with-your-resources/in which he pointed out marketers usually do not fully make use of their available resources.