CAPSTONE!

Rounding third and heading home

We are headed down the home stretch for the project and we are in turbo mood. Last week we visited Ohio State University Faculty Club to gain some insights on how they have been so successful for so long. We talked to the club director, board members, and members who have been around for 40+ years. they gave us great information on what we need to focus on and how to make our recommendations to the UC club even better and hit home. 

This week we need to start putting ideas on paper and start putting together the report and presentation so it gives us plenty of time to proof read and edit to make it perfect. The next couple weeks will test time management, drive, and motivation to see how we work under pressure and time cruch. 

BLOG POST 9: Analysis is not a piece of cake...

Well the past week I have been a little relaxed as it was spring break and I really needed some time off. But I have started the analysis of the results of my survey. As I had mentioned earlier I have 3 surveys; one for current families who are associated with ATS, one for current volunteers working at ATS and one for the prospective volunteers i.e current students of UC. I must say I am overwhelmed by the responses that I got and I have more responses than I had initially targeted. People took their time to give really insightful responses. There are so many aspects that me and my client would have never thought about had we not got the responses. There is a lot of good data to work with and I am very content.

Since most of my research work is Qualitative in nature that is why it's taking me a little more time to analyze everything and generating a report. But this week I have to work extra hard to organize and analyse all my data. Once that is done I will set up a meeting with my client and their web designer as my client wants to improve their website by incorporating the insights that I have from my survey. I will also try and make their website look a little less text heavy and more graphic. This week I have too much work lined up but I am feeling confident that if I invest a little more time to it, I will surely achieve my goals within the mentioned time frame.  

 

Down the Right Path

After about a month of feeling confused and without a clear direction, I feel Taylor and I are heading down the right path with our project.  We finally heard back from our client after about a month.  I was nervous to hear her response regarding our decision to realign.  It was a relief to hear that she supported our decision and thought that our new strategy sounded amazing.

Taylor and I did not stop working over spring break.  We packed the week up with research.  On Tuesday, we scheduled a tour of the Miller Treatment Plant on Kellogg Ave, in the Village of California.  We met with Jeff Vogt, Senior Chemist Process Control in the Water Quality & Treatment Division at GCWW's Miller Treatment Plant. He spoke in great detail about the history of GCWW and various processes to treat the water.  It was refreshing to hear from someone who is so passionate not only about his work, but also his employer.  We walked away from the tour very excited. We learned a lot from Jeff and also got some pretty amazing quotes that support our overall recommended marketing strategy as well as our rebranding recommendation.

In addition to the tour Taylor and I continued to work on our brand strategy for GCWW.  With a rich history dating back to the late 1800's, it will be important for GCWW to leverage their roots in order to appear as an authentic brand.

Taylor and spent the tail end of the week speaking to residents of Cincinnati that feel they are brand champions. I enjoyed hearing Cincinnatians speak about our water and GCWW, as well as what they hope to see happen for GCWW's bicentennial celebration. 

Moving into the weekend, I will continue to analyze our Qualtric survey to pull nuggets of data that supports our various recommendations.

Overall, I think this was one of our better week throughout this Capstone project and I am excited to start pulling together our final report.

BLOG POST 8 : Amidst all the data

As I have mentioned in my earlier posts, most of primary the research that I am doing for my project is qualitative in nature. Preparing questions of that nature was definitely a difficult ordeal however now that I have most of the responses it seems like dissecting the results and analyzing it is going to be another tough job. Some of the questions that I had in my survey were open ended and I did so to give the respondents to put in their experience in their own words. I really wanted to know the kind of phrases they come up with and did not want to confine their thought process. I must say that this has worked out quite well for me. Though I haven't yet got the time to go through all the responses, I did look through some of them and I saw some brilliant insights.

I also met up with my client last week. She introduced me to her co-worker Mr.Troup, who helps promote the volunteering opportunity at ATS. I learnt that they do not have a strong message for the students (prospective volunteers) and also that he goes to different classes and during the classes talks about the volunteering opportunities at ATS. He essentially just tells the students the various benefits of volunteering at ATS and that is it. As a marketing student I felt that they are not really "marketing" themselves well to the prospective volunteers. They can come up with a hundred advantages of volunteering however if it does not resonate with the students they would not really pay attention to it. So my next step would be to test out various benefit statements and come up with a message that really resonates and reaches out to all students across campus. 

Just wanted to add that I have my second project review with Prof.Boyd in about 2 hours. Really nervous and anxious about that. Wish me luck.

Emotional Rollarcoaster

This past week was a stressful week in my capstone world, trying to balance my work life, school life, and capstone life.  I feel somewhat a sense of guilt that my personal life took precedence over my capstone project this week.  I think I feel these emotions as major changes in all aspects of my life are coming to fruition (career advancement opportunities, getting married May 14th, and finishing my masters). I am sure I will continue on this emotional rollercoaster as our project moves on.

As for our project, I spent several hours in the car traveling to and from Chicago working on brand development for GCWW.  I began identifying GCWW’s emotional and functional benefits, as well as features and attributes, to ultimately identify the brand’s core essence.  I also dug deep into GCWW’s history in preparation to complete an authenticity audit and identify their band character.  This module is a major component of our project as our research as showed that GCWW has a rather poor perception among the Greater Cincinnati community.

Taylor and I continue to face communication issues with our capstone client.  It is becoming clear as time moves on, our project becomes more and more out of scope.  I am looking forward to our project review 2 meeting with Professor Boyd to discuss some of these issues we are experiencing and strategize for the second half of our project.  Taylor and I will continue to make an effort to push on with our project even though we are still lacking this key information.

Still Truckin'

Presley and I finally got our charter done after figuring out exactly how we were going to approach this project. For a minute there we were going in 100 different directions with our thoughts. we finally narrowed them down to the most important and where we felt we were going to be able to make the greatest impact. 

We are still trying to get our survey out to the Faculty and Staff, Provost Davenport didn't respond to our email. We were able to get in contact with her assistant who said he will let her know what is going on and see if she will help us. I don't have any worries about her turning us down because she is a big proponent for the Faculty Club and keeping it around. 

The next steps for us are to do a core Competency analysis and the Value proposition. These will help us figure out where we want to position the Club and how to go about doing so. With the core competency we will be going for an emotional appeal more then what the club can offer because it will mean more. 

BLOGPOST 4: The Going Gets Tough

Questionnaire completed and sent for review.That is probably the only thing that went well this week.The week has not ended as yet but as I am going on a short trip from Friday, I had to complete a week's worth of work in just 2 days. And hence the title of this post.

Now that my survey questions are done and all I have to do is wait for the feedback from my client, I decided to gauge my focus elsewhere. I thought this would be a good time to start framing a Competitive Matrix for my client. But what I realized was before going any further in the project I must go through the Big Picture again. To be honest, now that I am working with a client and trying to reach specific goals of the client, the Big Picture Framework is making a lot more sense. When I studied it earlier in the Marketing Strategy class I understood the concepts; however the application in real life situations was obviously not that clear. But that is definitely changing. As I am going further in my Capstone the steps of the Big Picture are helping me to formulate a complete and compact strategy for my client. It is clear to me that without this sort of a framework it is really very difficult to develop an appropriate strategy. 

Apart from this I have decided to take help from the Influence strategy, Innovation tools, Quanlitive research, Buyer Behaviour and Branding classes that I had taken previously. There are various portions of all these classes that I can use in different parts of my Capstone. So my next task would be to decide which specific portions of these subjects I would be using and to start revising those. I can safely say that Capstone is a true blend of theory and practical field work.

Redirect

After Presley and I have done all of the background research, meet with all important parties involved we have decided that our project is much more than just raising awareness about the Faculty Club. We have decided to completely restart the club from the base level. We found that they don't have a clear business plan, mission, or vision for what the club was suppose to be and services they were providing. That is the base problem of then club that we gave the board of governors instructions to come to a conclusion and right out the previously mentions plans. 

So we have decided to completely rebrand the club. We are going to redefine what the club is, who can join, and what functions they are going to perform for campus. This is going to involve a lot more work and creativity then we had initially thought, but this is going to be awesome because we can see we helped changed the fate of the club if our plan is fulfilled and executed. This is also giving us great experience in real world scenarios where companies have to rebrand, so we are going to gain great experience from this project and from our initial thought of not having a major corporation like P&G and being jealous, i think in the end we are going to get more out of the project we are doing. 

Blog Post 3 : What a shame!

I understand that the title of this post may seem pretty ambiguous and quite misleading as well; however wait till I explain the reason behind it. One thing that I have learnt through experience and also through the different marketing courses I have taken, is the fact that any proposal that we give to the client has to be backed up be relevant research. There are two components of primary research that are vital; one is the questions that is prepared to do the survey for the research and second is the respondents who answer these questions. These two things have the most impact on the research.

I realize that the questions have to be clear, succinct , non suggestive, probing (to an extent but not too much). The questions should be asked in a way that it's responses give adequate and appropriate results. However the most brilliant of questions would be worthless if we do not have the right group of respondents to ask them to. The quality of respondents is extremely important in any research. 

In my case the target audience (and respondents) would be the parents of disabled individuals. My problem started when I began looking for respondents for my research. It became evident to me that it is quite difficult to find such respondents, as this is a sensitive issue to people and they do not like to discuss about it or answer questions about it. I spoke to some agencies who work in hiring respondents for research purpose but honestly I was doubtful about how credible their respondents would be. With all these things in my mind I spoke to my client and she very generously offered to help me out in my dilemma. She said that I should send my questionnaire to her and she will distribute it to the parents/guardians whose children study in her institute. This was a big help indeed. However she specified that she would not be able to ask the parents to give an one to one personal interview so I have to make the interview online so that they can take the interview as and when they please. Now initially what I wanted was Laddering interview as that gives the most insight into the consumer's mind. However now with the survey being online my wish of conducting a Laddering Interview is diminished; and hence "What a shame!". 

Lets see how this change in plan shapes up my research.

 

BP:2 ~ Putting the dots together.

14th January, 2016 I had the first meeting with my client. After my first meeting, though I was clear about what my client wanted, I was confused about how to go about with the research for it and to a certain extent “ambiguity” set in. So I decided to meet up with my client again and to dissect my deliverables for the capstone. The second meeting that I had with my client on 1/28/2016 proved to be immensely helpful and I got much more clarity on my project. After contemplation I understood that what my client really wanted was two things;

1. A clear , succinct message for the prospective families of individuals suffering from ASD and DD, about what ATS does and how ATS can help their loved ones live a happy, social and successful life.
2. A message for the current students of UC to volunteer in ATS peer programs.

As a marketing student I realize that it is important not only to come up with convincing messages for these groups but it is vital to put across these message in appropriate platforms so that it reaches maximum number of targets.

To come up with the appropriate messages and favorable platforms I need to conduct research on two different sets of respondents.

One research would be done on the families of the students of ATS, to know what their mind set was when they chose this school for their loved ones. It is a very sensitive topic especially for the parents and siblings of individuals suffering from intellectual disabilities and so the questions have to be framed very carefully so that the respondents do not feel bad or awkward answering them.

The second research has to be on the UC students of various fields to know what would make them volunteer to the different ATS programs to help the students there and also to know when and where they should hear about these volunteering opportunities.

Now that I have more clarity on my prime deliverables I will start drafting questionnaires for both these groups and I will also format my charter.

I will also be working with their website designer to make the website more interesting with clear information.

My ATS tour is coming up in the second week of February and I am really excited about that.