Week 1 In Review

Week 1 Material:
Chapter 1: Marketing Planning  (complete)
Marketing Myopia (complete)
Jeff Bezos Video (complete)

I really liked the Jeff Bezos video, but I was left with one main takeaway after his presentation: what is Zappos?  I had no clue, so I quickly looked it up to see what the fuss from Bezos was all about.  Turns out Zappos is an online site for shoes and clothes.  It's main claim to fame being female shoes.  OK, that's probably why I had never heard of them.  After reading the marketing planning chapter in our text it's clear that this was probably an unintentional side affect of their plan.  Why market their services to me? I could tell my wife about Zappos, but that seems like an unlikely way to drive traffic (men telling their wives to go shoe shopping??).  This ineffective advertising would more than likely drive up their cost per customer acquired.  So, I'm guessing if I looked into my wife's Cosmo or Vogue magazine I'm more likely to find a Zappos' ad than in my ESPN the magazine.  Based on Bezos support for Zappos I can only assume Zappos knows their customers very well, knows what they need, where to find them and how to get their attention!  So, when Zappos put their long term marketing plan together I was not apart of it and for good reason!

 

The overriding theme of the first three assignments was the importance of focusing on the customer.  It's a very simple concept and sounds kind of obvious.  But I can see how the focus can easily stray from the customer in a big successful multinational corporation like mine.  The Levitt article mentions the importance of having a CEO with a singular focus on the customer.  What if your CEO didn't have that focus?  What if your CEO was a Finance guy? Maybe the focus would be on cost cutting and margin expansion.  What if the CEO is from Operations? Maybe the focus is on lean manufacturing and quality.  What if it's an Engineer, and your company is so R&D focused that it's inventing products for the sake of inventing products.  These are all good strategies a company should have to address the wishes of shareholders, but not one can be the singular focus ahead of the customer!  Reading the Levitt article and thinking about the dangers of pigeon holing the focus of your company only stresses the importance of having a customer focused organization.

 

I work in Finance, I live in excel, I'm a go by the numbers type of guy, so Marketing is new territory for me.  The complexity of the marketing plan in the first chapter was very interesting.  When I think of marketing I think of advertising and Mad Men.  I also think of sitting with my Dad watching commercials and after almost every commercial him saying, "That was stupid".  It's interesting that some of these ads are the promotional product of a complex marketing plan.  Company X decides they want to meet a customer need,  they tailor a product for that need, they choose the market, they set the price,  and they choose the form of communicating that product and in some cases it ends with my Dad saying, "That was stupid".  I'm excited to learn more about creating a marketing plan in the weeks ahead!