Week 1 in Review

As my first week of the second semester comes to a close, I am both relieved and excited for the rest of it.  My first marketing class got off to an interesting start.  As I walked into the classroom I noticed I already knew everyone in the class.  That was a first.  The class ended up being made up entirely of kids from the honors management class last semester.  Nobody was sitting but that didn't seem weird because all the desks were pushed to the side and there was a semi-circle of chairs in the middle of the room.  I can't speak for everyone but I had assumed that the arrangement was from a previous class and that was not how we were going to be seated so I chose to wait and see what would happen when Doctor Spotts came in.  Turns out that was the way we were going to sit in class and that was confirmed when he came in and the first thing he said was, "Why is nobody sitting?"

After the initial realization that the semi-circle was meant for us, I quickly took my seat.  Because I was already comfortable with everyone in the class I didn’t feel anxious about being in the new class.  Having the same kids from the previous honors class really eased the stress of starting a new class.  The first day was pretty eventful.  We learned early that our professor, Doctor Spotts, likes to keep things fun and spontaneous.  Because of this, the first lesson on marketing stuck in my head.  We got learn about Peter Drucker.  If you don’t know who Peter Drucker is, he is an Austrian born business man who is considered to be the father of modern management.  I thought it was strange that we were learning about a manager in a marketing class but then we were shown how this man was actually a marketer.  Doctor Spotts showed several quotes said by Peter Drucker and asked us what we thought they meant.  Drucker was quoted as saying, “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”  What I took from this is that marketing is just as important as the product itself.  If you can’t market the product, then nobody wants to buy it.  Another quote we looked at was, “Marketing and innovation produce results: all the rest are costs.”  I think what Drucker is saying is that Marketing and innovation if done correctly will produce a positive result no matter what and they will make a business money where as purchasing supplies or renting a building will always result in negative funds.  Drucker knew that marketing was a key part to businesses but he is still known mostly for his management.  Not only did we learn about Drucker we also learned that Dilbert is a very good comic strip to read if we want to see a business from the perspective of an engineer.  Doctor Spotts told us about a particular comic in which Dilbert has to collaborate with the marketing department on Barbeque Wednesday.  This comic shows how another part of a company views marketing as a place where not much gets done.  I’m not saying every marketing department isn’t lazy but without a marketing department, there wouldn’t be much business.  Who’s going to sell the product you just made?  Who’s going to present to potential buyers?  The engineers?  No way they’re entirely too busy working on their next big project.  Selling a product is a full time job and it takes a specialist to get the maximum profit out of a product.  On Thursday we collaborated with Engineers to show how important marketing is.

            First thing on Thursday we were separated into groups and divided into groups made up of marketers and engineers.  My group is made up of Brady Lucia, Mike Chirco, Chun Chak, and Steven.  I was already acquainted with Mike so I got to meet Chun, Brady, and Steven a little.  All three are from the Springfield area and they all know what type of engineering they want to go into.  During the two truths one lie ice breaker I was paired up with Brady and I got to know a little bit about him.  He’s been to California and he’s got three dogs but I can’t remember what his lie was.  He’s been pleased with his time at Western New England, he did very well in his classes, and is looking forward to working in our group.  After the ice breakers we got right into the day’s lesson.  We started off by catching up the engineering students on who Peter Drucker is and then we got to watch an episode of Shark Tank.  In the episode, a college student was trying to pitch a new box design.  Unfortunately for her, she wasn’t in our Tuesday marketing class.  We had previously learned that trying sell a product where there is no market is like trying climb Mount Everest in shorts, a horrible idea.  The box she was trying to sell was more expensive than the current box design and it ended up taking up more space than a regular box.  It barely made any improvement on the original box design except for time saving.  As Mark Cuban brought up the average person using a box doesn’t really have a time constraint like a large company would have and a large company isn’t going to pay over a dollar per box.  Not only that, the woman was basically begging the Sharks to make a deal.  She really had no idea what she was doing.  Not only was her product unmarketable, she was a horrible marketer.  She was a horrible negotiator and severed ties with one of the Sharks before she even got an offer from another one.  If this was anywhere but national television, she would’ve left there with no offers and a failed idea.  While watching the show we would periodically stop it to talk about what was going on.  During the first stoppage, we were asked to think of what about her box was different from the old box.  We concluded that it was more structurally sound at the bottom and we thought it was smaller than a regular box but we later concluded it was the same size if not bigger when collapsed.  We also learned how to make statements in order to determine our market.  For the box, our group came up with, “A poor, busy college student needs to pack up quickly in order to leave for vacation.”  I found this part difficult because the box itself was very hard to market.  I learned that describing the person in great detail is very helpful in determining a product’s marketability.  Unfortunately the box proved to be too difficult to get a good description of someone who would prefer the new box over the old one.  After watching Shark Tank we were asked to look through newspapers and magazines to find three bugs or problems that people have in their lives.  I found this to be hard too because I think I was in the wrong frame of mind when looking.  I was looking for specific problems when I should have been looking for problems that were broader ad effected more people.  What I ended up finding is blood donating, global warming, and dumps.  Donating blood is a problem because we are always in need of more blood.  Not only that, blood expires very quickly so after a few weeks any leftover blood is useless.  Global warming is a growing problem because at the current rate we are going to end up ruining the environment so bad we’ll go past the point of no return.  If we were to go past that point, we would need a solution in order to stop anymore continued global warming.  Dumps are not so much of a problem as is the trash contained in them.  Dumps are overflowing and there really is no efficient way that has been creating to effectively remove all the waste we humans make.  This weekend I have to ask 4 non students what they think is a problem in their lives.  I’m looking forward to this because I’ll get to hear from people what they think some problems in daily life are.  Maybe I’ll learn of a problem that is so easy to solve I end up marketing a product that is a guaranteed problem solver.