CAPSTONE!

Less is more!

When we set out to gather information, there is always a temptation to capture as much information as possible. Sometimes, this temptation leads to spending more time and effort on information that may be good to know, but does not actually add much value to the goal. Also, if you are doing primary research, then it will unnecessarily lengthen your questionnaire which would mean that the respondents will have to spend more time in completing the survey. Therefore, it is necessary that before you start doing the actual primary research, you identify the precise need and requirement of doing the research and focus only on the required information and not the desired information!

In our case, although the client had recently done research, we could not fetch enough relevant data to create a customer perception matrix. Hence, we have decided to conduct another research survey with a goal to gather data that will help us create the perception matrix. A critical question that still remains unanswered is, "who sends out the questionnaire - whether the client or the consultants (us)?"  

The benefit of having the client send out the questionnaire to their clients is that the target audience already knows them and hence, the probability of receiving a greater number of responses is higher than if we were to send out the questionnaire to the target respondent group. At the same time, the drawback of this approach is that the responses might be positively or negatively biased towards the client, due to the respondent's prior knowledge of the client.

Perhaps, in the next blog I will be able to share my experiences of creating the perception matrix.

Extensions on Extensions

This past Sunday I was excited to get a head start on my weekly deliverable so I had time the rest of the week to perfect it as well as get other homework done. The week before last, things didn't go as planned with my Market Opportunity Analysis and I had to extend my deadline by a week because of lack of information; because of personal discipline, I didn't want to have to do this again. Well, this week, while opening the field book to look at my deliverable, the segmentation analysis, I soon realized that this was something that would take longer than a week to complete, and once again, I would need an extension on time. The segmentation analysis looks at the loyal customers of both the FE and competitors, multi-users of both, and then non-users, or areas of opportunity. We had all the information we needed for our FE, Hubert, but I came to a roadblock when thinking about the loyal and multi-brand customers of competitors as well as who the non-users were. I figured that the multi-brand users of competitors would obviously be the same as for Hubert, because simply put, they bought from multiple people. Our team struggled, however, on how to figure out who the loyal customers of our competitors were. How does one go about finding this out? Do we fish around and call competitors and ask them in a nonchalant manner? Or would our FE know? This was a gray area we hit initially. 

The next thing we had to figure out was who we wanted our nonusers to be. This was not just something that I could decide, areas of growth that I thought would be valuable, we needed a team consensus. It was important that all of us were on the same page because these areas of opportunity would be reflected throughout the rest of the report. Today we had a Skype meeting to discuss our thoughts and were able to come to an agreement on the opportunity areas, now it's time to put all the pieces together!

2 more months until graduation, we can do this!

I'm Not Above Begging

Before Snowpocalypse 2015 struck, we had our second face-to-face meeting with our client this week. Thank God for technology, which isn't always a perfect substitute for having everybody in the same room, but when it's -10 degrees outside and there's +10 inches of snow on the ground, it'll do just fine. We all chatted over our client's conference line and went over the results of our customer market research. Since we were just going over raw data, we were all just wrapping our heads around the data and trying to figure out the story it was telling (we were waiting to do doing the full analysis until we formally closed the surveys), but what we could ascertain was that it was only telling the story from the point of view of current customers, which is a problem since we're firmly positioned in Q3 with a steal share strategy. Our client's clients are all non-profit executives, so they operate under different incentives than your average corporate client, and don't respond to the same incentives (re: they aren't money motivated so giving them a $5 Amazon gift card in exchange for completing our customer service is probably going to be completely ineffective). So our mini-marketing challenge was to figure out how to 1. find and 2. approach non-customers and get them to take our survey. There's something like 7,000 non-profits in the Greater Cincinnati Area, and all of them are headed up by a CEO, most of whom also hold a regular corporate job, so there's a lot competing for their time and attention, least of which is a survey to take for us. Thanks to some skills from Direct Marketing, I found a downloadable list on the IRS website of every organization who filed as a 501(c)(3) organization in Cincinnati last year (3,000), which was great and gave us volume, but we still needed to figure out who of the 3,000 were even the people we wanted to be talking to, and how to convince them to open an email and take a survey. Our client was thoroughly stoked to get the 501(c)(3) list, so if anything, at least we've given them that so far, and did a first pass highlighting those who met their membership criteria. What followed was a TON of busywork tracking down websites, staff lists, and email addresses from key personnel and then crafting an email invitation--our angle was to try to persuade them to join our insider's panel to offer valuable insights that would help shape the Cincinnati non-profit community. After hours and hours spent contacting what ended up being about 75 key CEOs, we still haven't gotten nearly as many responses as we'd like from the non-customer segment, so the question remains: How do we divide our effort and limited time? Do we sacrifice quality responses for volume of responses, or do we accept a small sample size that may not be representative of the entire group? 

Marching 2x2 - Hurrah, hurrah

As a math major in college, I never would have dreamed that matrices would be so important in business school.

You can compare anything of a 2x2 matrix, and the analysis is extremely helpful when trying to find the nuances within an area. One type of 2x2 matrix that was the center of my team's discussion this week is the white space adjacency quadrant. Having the ability to quickly rule out to of the 4 quadrants, we are stuck debating - is this a scope of quad 3 or quad 4? With some many similarities between the two, we had a lot of difficulty trying to decide (and are actually still discussing) which is going to the the strongest approach given our scope for Hubert. Matrices, then, don't just show nuances; they also can show grey areas leading to difficult decisions of where to focus time/money/effort/resources. You can't be all things to all people all the time and the focus leads to deficiency, productivity, and (hopefully) strong growth!

For now, Team Hubert will keep marching 2x2 (matrices) as we go through, and we'll see where it takes us, what we can learn, and ultimately what we will recommend for Hubert.

Storytelling

Our group presented our project flow and main ideas to the class this week. We knew we had some things to work out, but we were looking forward to seeing what the class thought. We have talked ourselves in circles on Big Picture, we desperately needed a set of outside eyes.

We got A LOT of good feedback. We have gone back to the drawing board to reorganize the flow of our presentation and have re-crafted our recommendations. I think we finally we have our AH HA moment. Although I thought I had my AH HA moment awhile back while trying gloves on Home Depot, but this one trumps the last one. This project had such a wide scope that we were almost drowning in ideas and possible outcomes. Tonight Drew and the class helped us pull out the important pieces so we can continue to piece this thing together! We spent some time with a white board and re-mapped our presentation into a storytelling format. We are confident that this format suits our project better and are looking forward to getting final feedback on the revised version from our peers and Drew one more time before the final presentation on Monday 4/7.

 

 

Which Way From Here?

Last week, Cliff and I did some in-depth interviews with current All About Kids (AAK) franchise owners. After doing in-depth phone interviews, I feel like I have gained some great insight to the business. The questions we asked were to gain information on the reasons and motivations that pushed owners to invest into the franchise. Almost all owners had different reasons for investing in the AAK franchise, but the main reason was for retirement purposes and having that extra flow of income. In my opinion, the best question asked to these AAK franchise owners was, “Would you reinvest back into the business knowing what you know now?” This question has really allowed us to see current owners willingness to reinvest. All owners said yes, of course. I think asking that question speaks volume to the dedication and believe into the AAK business model. 

Currently Cliff and I are reviewing the in-depth interviews and online survey responses before our second project review on Thursday. We have a lot to review and discuss. The next couple of stages are crucial for us to come up with a marketing strategy. I hope that the project review will point us in the right direction on where to end up.

 

Familiar Territory - Social Media

    This week, Casey and I made some significant headway. From the beginning, we planned to address the digital strategy deliverable towards the end of our capstone. That time is here now. Prior to beginning the digital strategy deliverable, we expected that it would be difficult for us to develop a plan for Meridian since their customer base is much different than the clients we had in E-marketing. However, we found out quickly that our experience with social media marketing and the fundamentals we learned in E-marketing class would both be beneficial for this portion of our capstone.

            Casey and I looked at the different platforms that Meridian is currently on and also glanced at their competitors’ online presences (we will delve deeper next week). We came up with the idea to create a Qualtrics survey to gather information about when the target audience of Meridian is most likely to be on social media, and more specifically, on which platforms. Our intention is to gather some valuable insights from our survey to support our recommendations for their digital strategy.

            We will meet with Luke on Monday to check in and continue the competitive matrix since we have not been able to access the data provided by Meridian off-site. We also plan to work with Luke on the Market Opportunity Analysis and Segmentation Analysis. 

Customer Contacts

I have found it to be extremely tricky when trying to get in touch with customer contacts for our segmentation analysis. For some reason I keep questioning myself, am I being too passive? I definately do not want to come across as too forward. I have a terrible habit of second guessing myself. Anyways, I know I just need to get over it and get things done. 

I hope everyone else is having luck with their projects!

Online Work Week

    My blog post is late this week. I was doing well too. Even despite Drew’s repeated reminders, it slipped my mind.

            Working with Luke continues to be productive. Casey and I were confident that we could get back on track easily and this has held true so far. Last week, Luke granted us access to their product portal so we can familiarize ourselves with the competitive landscape. The Market Research is extensive but no one with Meridian has really had a chance to analyze the data yet. This task benefitted Casey and I with our capstone deliverables (competitive analysis, market opportunity analysis, and segmentation analysis) but will also be beneficial for Meridian to have an even clearer picture of their competitive landscape.

            Luke is out of town this week but Casey and I are continuing to work on Google Docs. We have an outline for our final presentation and are working to fill in and complete the gaps!

Target audiences and innovations and segmentation, oh my!

    After class last Monday, when we discussed certain problems that everyone is having, my specific issue was finding out the potential DV.  That afternoon, Allison and I had a big breakthrough as we were going through some research that they sent us.  We thought we found the key target audience, which when we probed for more information on our gloves with the client, that doesn't match the target audience they said to us. 

    I thought that it would be much easier now that we had our idea of TA, however that was short lived once we started reasoning things out and looking.  I thought having the TA would make things much clearer, more focused, oh silly me.  It wasn't until we met yesterday and we started looking at the STP tool and the Segmentation Variables, that I started to question whether they know something about the light DIYer that either we aren't asking the right question or they aren't telling us.  The gloves they designed highly feature the bottom 2 variables that consumers pay attention to based on their research, which ledme to wonder if they were going after those so that they could stand out.  But if they knew they were going for standout, why not try and be the best in terms of the top variables that concern consumers?

    At this point, after Friday's innovation and this new discovery revolving around the variables, we have an innovation workshop scheduled next weekend with our group and I think that our constraints should be not on price, but constraint to the top variables that consumers pay attention to.  If we can innovate on those, I think that we will get much more out of it, possibly take innovate on the (best) innovations we came up with.  We are switching products to give ourselves a fresh look, Allison and I are doing welding and Katie and Mike doing Extreme Wear, so I think possibly Allison and I should agree on a list of variables and make those the constraints rather than keep the ones we have, in the hope that it will create better ideas to present at the end.