SWOT Resources

If this is your first visit to this site,welcome to the class blog!
Your first assignment for this course is to put together a SWOT analysis for the brand Method. This will provide you with some much needed practice for putting together the SWOT analysis for your chosen client.


As I always warn students, SWOT  (or Strengths - Weaknesses - Opportunities - Threats), sounds deceivingly simple. The matrix itself is indeed a simple and easy to understand concept. However, actually putting together a comprehensive, in-depth SWOT for a company can prove challenging, especially when it comes to opportunities and threats. Here are a few outside sources that you might find useful when preparing the assignment or the SWOT for your client:

• http://www.netmba.com/strategy/swot/
• http://rapidbi.com/created/SWOTanalysis.html#howtodoaswot
• The following is a great example, a SWOT Analysis for Walgreens. As you can see in the document, every SWOT element is explained and justified in detail:  http://www.acraretail.org/documents/Walgreens_Barbero.pdf

After you complete the SWOT analysis for your client, you should ask yourself the following questions:

• How can the client use their strengths and effectively take advantages of the opportunities you identified?
• How can the strengths be used to overcome the threats the client is facing?
• What should the client do to minimize the weaknesses you identified and be able to both face their threats and take advantage of the identified opportunities?

Answering these questions will help guide your marketing recommendations.

If you have any SWOT-related questions or comments, please make them here.

Great Advertising: The Mini Cooper Case

Anyone can come up with an ad, but only a few of the ads that are flooding our lives on a daily basis actually reach their target, and fewer still are memorable enough to make an impact on their audience. For this assignment, you will learn more about what constitutes great advertising. There are two assigned readings. The first one is an article that highlights the characteristics of great advertising using a very creative and successful Mini Cooper ad campaign as an example. The second reading, takes you behind the scenes of this Mini Cooper ad and gives you a few more examples.

After reading both articles, return here and leave a short reaction (10 lines minimum) to the readings. Then, provide your own example of an ad that you think is great. Discuss how the five attributes identified in the article (attention getting, memorable, brand appropriate, audience relevant, and remarkable) apply to your ad. In addition, similar to the examples we went over in class, identify the advertising objective for your ad (informative, persuasive, or reminder) and the appeal of the ad (rational, emotional, or moral). Ideally, try to provide a link for the ad. If you can not find it online, then describe it in detail beforehand.
As an alternative, since bad ads are easier to find, you can also find and discuss an ad you think is particularly bad. The same details that you would discuss for the great ad (the five criteria, the objective and the appeal) also need to be discussed for the bad ad. In addition, if you choose this alternative, you should also have some suggestions on how this unfortunate ad could have been improved.

Click here to read the first article
(Full link: http://www.mpdailyfix.com/mini-cooper-ad-fires-on-all-cylinders/)
Click here to read the second article
(Full link: http://www.mpdailyfix.com/exclusive-story-behind-the-mini-cooper-christmas-box-ads/)

Points: 25
Deadline: Friday, April 16th, 11:59pm

Pricing: Is It All About Consumer Psychology?

We spent our last lecture talking about pricing, from basic concepts and factors, to the various pricing strategies. Now I want to draw your attention back to one topic, psychological pricing, and a related concept anchor pricing or more simply put anchoring. This concept is at the center of a recent book on pricing Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It), by William Poundstone. For this assignment, you will have to read the book review recently published in Business Week. After reading the page-long article, you have to write a short reaction (a minimum of 10 lines). Then, think about when you encountered anchoring while shopping or maybe in another setting. Analyze and recount that experience in detail. Why was it anchoring? Why did it work on you? 

Click here to start reading the review. Once you are done reading, return to this post to complete the assignment. When you have a chance, I strongly encourage you to read the entire book. It is an easy read and can help you become a smarter shopper & seller.

Points: 20
Deadline: Friday, March 26th, 11:59pm.

Health & Wellness Consumer Segmentation

The Health & Wellness Trends Database of the Natural Marketing Institute identified in 2008 five different consumer segments when it comes to health and wellness. Click here to read the description of the each of the five segments shown in the above image. After carefully reading the descriptions, find examples of products or services specifically targeted at 3 of the five segments (one product per segment). You must explain and justify your choice! As usual, you cannot use examples that someone else has already included in their comment, so the earlier you finish this assignment, the easier it will be for you to get it done.
Points: 10
DEADLINE: Friday, February 26th, 11:59pm.

Source: 2008 Health and Wellness Trends Database

The Power of the Alpha Pups:The Hasbro Case

During our consumer buyer behavior lecture, we discussed the influence of various social groups on decision making as well as the power of word of mouth (WOM), opinion leaders, and connectors. Now, let's look a bit closer at one particularly successful marketing strategy that illustrates several of the concepts covered in class. For this assignment, you have to carefully and thoroughly read and discuss the following article that was published in the New York Times (August 5, 2001): http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/05/magazine/here-come-the-alpha-pups.html?pagewanted=all

As you go through the article, try to recognize the concepts discussed in class and their application in this case (e.g. market research, buzz marketing or WOM marketing, opinion leaders/ influencers, etc.). Was Hasbro's campaign a success? Why? What contributed to their success? Your reaction to the article should be a minimum of 10 lines. In addition, you also have to consider whether a similar strategy would work for other product categories, or other segments of consumers? Come up with at least one example.
Points: 20
DEADLINE: Friday, February 19th, 11:59pm.

Final Exam Scheduling

As we discussed in class, common finals (such as the one for MGMT221), are usually scheduled on Saturday. In order to see if Friday might be an option, we need to know if anyone taking this class has final exams on Friday, and if you do, at what time. So please leave a short comment to this post with your exam schedule for Friday during Final's week (just the time for your exams will suffice). If you do not have any exams scheduled on that day, it is important that you leave a comment as well to indicate that. Please see below the current Spring 2010 Final Exam Schedule (Click on the image to enlarge).

It is imperative that you reply to this post before the end of the day Wednesday, February 17th.

Cause-Related Marketing: To profit or not to profit?

While cause-related marketing was a topic we only briefly discussed during our last lecture (as it is unfortunately often the case with most topics in an intro class), its growing presence in the corporate arena and its social and ethical implications make it almost mandatory to pause here and take a closer look. Cause marketing corporate spending has been steadily growing over the past couple of decades from only about $120 million in 1990, to $816 million in 2002, and $1.5 billion in 2009 [1]. There are several ways in which a company can tie itself and/or its products to a cause: advertising, public relations, sponsorship, licensing, direct marketing, facilitated giving, and, the most popular, purchase-triggered giving [2]. For this blog assignment you will learn about each one of these six main types as well as the many marketing, social, and ethical issues surrounding cause-related marketing by reading the following article that was published on prwatch.org:
"Cause-Related Marketing: Why Social Change and Corporate Profits Don't Mix" by Inger Stole

 Important note about the article: Please be aware that in this article, Inger Stole uses the acronym CRM to refer to cause-related marketing, although, as you learned in this class, the acronym CRM is widely used to refer to customer relationship management. 

 After thoroughly reading the article, your assignment is to post here (as a comment) a minimum 10 line reaction to the information presented to you. Then you have to find and discuss a cause-related marketing example: identify which one of the six types it belongs to, was it a successful marketing endeavor for the company, how do you feel about it, was it cause-related or cause-exploitative. Your examples need to be different from those found by everyone else who posts their comments before you, so the earlier you complete the assignment the better. You also have to find examples different from those already presented in the article. If you find your example online, include the link for your source in the comment.

Sources:
[1] http://www.causemarketingforum.com/page.asp?ID=188
[2] http://www.prwatch.org/node/4965
www.yoplait.com

Porter's Five Forces

When we discussed in class the company environment, specifically the microenvironment, we briefly talked about Porter's 5 Forces Model. It is a powerful tool that has been widely used (sometimes even misused) to analyze the industry environment, judge industry attractiveness, and even uncover potential sources of competitive advantage. The author, Michael Porter, has reviewed, clarified and updated his model in a recent HBR article. Even if you are not planning to use his model for your group projects, I still very strongly urge you to read the article and watch the associated video. You will find it very useful. Here's the link: http://hbr.org/2008/01/the-five-competitive-forces-that-shape-strategy/ar/1

If you want to learn more about Porter's 5 Forces and how to use the model for your project, QuickMBA has a very detailed description. Here's the link for that: http://www.quickmba.com/strategy/porter.shtml
As usual, any comments, questions, reactions are to be posted here.

Everything you wanted to know about SWOT

SWOT Analysis is one of those topics that seem deceivingly simple. Although Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats sounds very straight forward, it is sometimes difficult to put together a strong, comprehensive SWOT analysis (remember your in-class exercise experience). To learn more about SWOT, take a close look at the information compiled on this webpage: http://rapidbi.com/created/SWOTanalysis.html#howtodoaswot. It contains extensive lists for everything that could go under each of the SWOT categories, along with several examples. You should take a particularly close look at Opportunities and Threats, which is an area most of you struggled with in class.

(Note about the website: some of the title links at the top of the page don’t work, so you will just have to do it the old fashion way and scroll down the page to see the entire content).

I urge you to take your time and carefully review this information because you will most likely have to do a SWOT analysis for your first Exam.

Given our limited class time, I would like you to use this blog post for any SWOT related questions, concerns, or ideas you might have. Also, if you found a great SWOT example/website that you think your classmates should know about, share it here.

Looking for group members?

Hi everyone! It has been brought to may attention that several students are having trouble connecting with classmates to form a group. So, I am starting this post to serve as a bulleting board for this purpose. If you are a group looking for more group members, voice your "call for members" here. If you are a student looking for a group, again, put your group request in a comment right here.
Best of luck! See you all Wednesday and don't forget about Task 1 (see the post below).

Week 1

Welcome to the MGMT221 Class Blog. During the course of the semester I will post here short assignments for you to complete. They could be as simple as finding examples of certain types of ads, or as involved as reading a short article and answering a few questions. Each assignment will appear here as a separate post. You will submit your answers to assignments by simply leaving a comment to each post by the indicated deadline.

Your first task during week 1 is to create a Gmail account and to become a follower of this blog (go to www.gmail.com to create the account; if you already have an account, go ahead and use that one). Then, from your new Gmail address (or your old one, as the case may be), send me an email to drhodis at gmail.com with your full name. This is necessary in order for me to be able to keep track of the points you earn by participating on this blog. You must also leave a comment to this post (a simple hello will do), just to make sure that everyone is familiar with the entire process. This assignment is worth 5 points and the deadline for completion is Tuesday, January 19th.

I look forward to meeting you all on Wednesday!