Adventures in Marketing

I chose JCCC for my academics because it is a low cost and nearby college. It also allowed me to decide what my area of study would be without wasting much, if any money. I chose Marketing Management as my field of study because my employer offers tuition reimbursement if we choose a field related to any position within the company. I am currently a social media moderator and a step into the marketing realm seems like the next step in my career path. Along the way, I learned I have some natural ability and intuition when it comes to marketing management. My most valuable class experience was the marketing simulator. It really showed me how much I’d learned over the years I’ve spent here at JCCC. It has really helped to improve my imposter syndrome with the reassurance that I’m absolutely qualified for a position in marketing management. The most challenging class I’ve conquered so far is accounting. I survived it with a B. It was my first B, while pursing this degree but I was so happy to have learned as much as I did! I have built so much confidence in myself over the years I’ve spent here. I am more confident in myself and my abilities now. That is a huge personal accomplishment for me! I have also brought my GPA up to a 3.0 after it was 0.03 when I began my quest for this degree. I am now set to graduate at the same time as my oldest son next May. I am so happy to be ready to finally obtain a degree a good 20 years in the making! My largest desire is to show my children to keep going even when the road is tough, and the path forward isn’t clear. I want them to know that they can do absolutely anything they put their minds to! I have believed this in them from day one but found it difficult to believe in myself. Now I’ve spent years of late night studying and proving that I’m capable of achieving one A at a time. This has inspired immeasurable confidence in myself and has allowed me to develop strategies to assert my concerns to my boss and remove roadblocks from my workflow. This will help me to advance my career and has already helped me in my current position. I am so grateful to my professors, tutors and fellow students that helped me to believe in myself!

This semester I had the opportunity to work with a team of my classmates through this business simulator. The simulator project had teams of three or four students work together as a business to build a brand for a carbon fiber bicycle company. The simulator starts off with creating a brand logo and company name. Then the team works together to figure out which segments they’d like to initially invest in and start making designs for. After the name and logo are decided, the team divides responsibilities and appoints a president. Then the team works together to make business decisions and put a cumulation of marketing knowledge and skill together to form the first two years of a company from the ground up. The goal is to be a profitable and successful company that builds bikes and adds features based on what the customers are interested in. These were determined by several different criteria and I will elaborate on those as well. The name of our bike company is Tread Light Bike Co.

Balanced Scorecard

This is where the financials were shown for our company. It is what measures the teams ability to effectively manage the resources of the business. It shows historical data as well as projects how well the business will do in the future, the action potential is measured here. Tread Light Bike Co. had the most balanced scorecard. We were first place in total performance, financial performance, market performance, marketing effectiveness and creation of wealth. The only critique on our scorecard is that we placed second for investments in the firm’s future. There is some room for improvement, and we did tend to play it safe in this area as we were reluctant to expand too quickly and disrupt the cash flow.

Competition

Tread Light Bike Co. absolutely crushed the competition, ending quarter eight with 70% of the overall market share. We were able to achieve this because we had the largest selection of available bikes and we had two bikes for each available segment. Early on, we realized the more we were able to diversify our selections, the better we’d set ourselves apart from the competition. We hired the most staff and invested in specialized training for our sales teams. We also had more local and regional advertising than our competitors. I believe this combination really helped us to establish ourselves as the number one bike company in the carbon fiber bike industry.

Responsibilities

Our team of three voted Danny to be our President. He kept things very well organized and did a great job focusing the team on what the next steps we’d need to get done each week. In addition to that, he also was the Vice President of Finance and Business Analytics. His interpretation of those numbers were a vital part of our team’s success! The Vice President roles of Internet Marketing and Advertising were fulfilled by Abby. She used her incredible talents to create our logo and was great at getting the best and highest ranking ads out each quarter of our business. I took on the responsibilities of  Vice President of Brand Management and Sales Management. I feel that these two pairings were best suited for my abilities. I got a real understanding of how these two positions would need to communicate often with sales goals and how to make the brand appealing to more customers with design enhancements.

Objectives

Tread Light Bike Co. met and exceeded our objectives! The most impressive part was the revenue we earned in quarter 8, just over $10 million! We were able to achieve our goals by diversifying our offerings and being profitable and popular  in every segment. Our brand recognition was dominating even in segments that were not as profitable. The addition of the speed segment really helped us to keep our margins high even when we were developing features for kids bikes that were not as profitable.  We managed our bike offerings based off our customer brand reviews and made improvements as necessary to meet the demands of our customers. We made two bikes for each segment so that our sales teams had a better and best sales strategy and our customers had options to select from. We also opened stores for every available location and were slow to invest in costly rents where our competitors had a good stronghold. We we the last company to open a retail outlet in New York City and we focused our cashflow on R&D instead.

Different Approach?

Knowing what I know now, would I have taken a different approach? I would have pushed to open retail stores faster. I also would have not been such a timid investor in research and development. I would have invested in the bells and whistles sooner and not spanned out any of them from one quarter to the next. We had the cash available and I was a bit more cautious than I probably should have been.

What lessons did you learn through your Marketing Simulator experience?

The biggest lesson for me was seeing impact of expanding our focus and designing bikes for each segment. The diverse portfolio and high brand judgement allowed us to use the more profitable segments as leverage into less profitable markets. I learned to enjoy a part of math and I never thought that was something I’d ever have the slightest interest in. Another huge lesson I learned is the importance of teamwork and dedication. We all worked so hard and communicated very regularly to share information and ideas with our team mates to make sure there was enough budget available for everything we wanted to do. I learned I can be part of a team without being the person in charge of the team. I was able to trust in others and I really enjoyed Danny’s leadership style. I appreciated the way that any person on my team could fill in for another position to assist if someone was having a rough week. 

How did you benefit from participating in the simulation?

The simulation was honestly a huge confidence booster for me. It was a great way to put the puzzle together, so to speak. I learned multiple parts of how a business functioned and the importance of being first to market with a great design and new features. The simulation confirmed for me that I am good at working with a team and making marketing decisions and that it’s not just being good at taking tests. It was a great way to get some real world experience without potentially dangerous consequences of bad business.

What lessons can you take into the business world?

I can take many lessons into the business world. Specialized training and incentives for sales staff is vital to the success of a retail outlet. Appropriately staffing stores to ensure customers are not waiting around for an available associate is critical to closing sales. I also learned that the correct R&D investments can get a business set apart from the competition and then can build success on top of that to truly dominate an industry.

Tread Light Bike Co. Awards Earned: 

Top 10% Worldwide
1st Place Team
Certificate of Completion

Our team works very well together and we were quickly able to come up with a design. This is not the design we chose to go with, but it was a fun process none the less. I really like the simplistic style with elements of depth like the tread and mud splatter. I do wish that it was easier to read the name of the company, so that the company was not leaning so heavily on the image itself. It was a great experience and our team all decided on a very similar color scheme. I had decided to create a modern looking dark green on a light green background. I tend to be a perfectionist, so I had to stop myself from over complicating the project. It was an overall win and and I’m happy to add it to my portfolio.

Hi, my name is Melissa. I’m a nontraditional student working full time as a social media moderator. I’ve been working on an associates degree in Marketing Management for a few years now and am finally so close to finishing it up!

I have worked with the marketing team off and on with projects in my current role with my employer. Beyond that, I have taken a social media marketing class and worked with the Cub Scouts to try and create more of an online presence. It was a short class, but I gained a lot of knowledge from it and plan to use it if I’m needed for any additional marketing projects at work.

I was able to use my internship time with my current employer, Garmin. It was really great to be able to directly impact my career while continuing my education. I was able to make several S.M.A.R.T. goals and implement them immediately. It really helped me to focus on my secondary tasks and get them completed in a timely manner and take actionable steps to become more of a leader in my position.

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This semester I discovered a lot more about myself than I realized. I discovered my INSJ personality type and that has helped me to learn why I am the way I am. It also helps me to learn to lean on others when they have a strength in an area where I am in need of developing a skill. I have partnered with ENFJ personality types on my team and have accomplished many more tasks because they are so very charismatic when presenting the data we’ve both interoperated. I have stepped way outside my comfort zone to ask people for help in doing some of these assignments and learned that it is ok to be pushed out of your comfort zone because you can learn things about yourself you didn’t know you were capable of. I have also developed a professional development plan and that is something that for all my organization skills and talents, I have never seen a clear path to the future prior to this class. Finding measurable and achievable goals are some of the first steps to success and climbing that cooperate ladder.

Professional Development Plan – MelissaRose

Informational Interview Reflection

I interviewed Kyle Smidt, he is a founding member of the Social Media Team at Garmin International. He works full time as Social Media Moderator. I chose to interview Kyle because he has been a senior member of his team for several years and is in charge of training new employees. He is a team player and encourages a collaborative team environment. 

I was surprised to hear that Kyle had no previous Social Media experience prior to accepting his role and that his strong writing background was instrumental in landing him the job.

I can envision myself growing into his role and becoming a senior member of the Social Media Team. I also have a relatively strong writing background and am great at multitasking and am working on a development plan to become a trainer. I have gained some experience in the field and have used my troubleshooting skills on specialty products to propel myself forward in that direction. I am continuing to gain experience daily and am working towards allowing more daytime availability in my work schedule to be there for typical training hours.

I plan to work directly with newly hired associates one-on-one instead of via Zoom call and improve my communication skills while teaching them my vast specialized product knowledge.

I learned that Social Media is vast and there is room for so many opportunities. Strong writing skills will always be necessary in those fields and keeping an open mind to new ideas is key. Adaptability is a major bonus as well as having a passion for helping others.

A couple of things I could work on are my communication skills as well as improve upon my time management skills. I am taking a communications class. I will continue to explore Communications classes offered in college as well as through my employer and online. I also plan on working to improve my time management skills by blocking out my time allowance for each project or task I am assigned.

This experience did not change my current long term goals, however it did help me to focus on my short term goals while I work towards more distant goals as I complete my education.

Informational Interview Video:

1. Share your key insights from everything you learned about Buyer Personas this week.

I really enjoyed the presentation of the Marketing Wheel. It really helps a company to visibly see where they’re excelling as well as which areas they may be struggling with. It seems to be a trend in after purchases that the WOW factor falls short with the customer’s experience. The visual representation of a wheel shows that a company is healthy and addressing all aspects of the buyer’s persona, if the points are closer to representing a circle without gaps. The areas that show room for improvement should be areas of focus where you can actionably show a boss the need and come up with a plan to move from a 2 to a 3 in small increments over time to really pump up that wheel.

2. Choose the company you currently work for OR a company/nonprofit you would love to work for in the future. Develop at least one persona for their target audience.

Melissa Rose

I watched the procrastinators unite webinar. It discussed working to help with Giving Tuesday. This helps with fundraising and projects where supporters can be involved with. It was to help procrastinators with a campaign for Giving Tuesday through a program called JustGiving. It helps with pre-made and customizable ad campaigns that can be edited or changed to help get a nonprofit organization some additional funds during this promotional time of year. I learned that it is never too late and that my skills are valuable and can be helpful to a nonprofit organization. Customizable templates and page organization can really help bring things together to help any organization with a tax ID in need of additional funds. I will apply this knowledge by looking into charities near and dear to my heart to see if they’ve already had someone set up an account in JustGiving for them. If someone hasn’t already done that, I will create a profile and set one up for Susan G. Komen. If it weren’t for their funding towards medical research, I would have died of Breast Cancer in 2014. I am thankful every day for their contributions and I’d love to find a way that I can help them back.

My Kickstarter worksheet is available in this link:

Kickstarter Worksheet

1. LinkedIn Learning (Sales Fundamentals + Preparing for a Career in Sales): What similarities did you notice between Sales Fundamentals and Marketing Fundamentals ?

There were similarities between these two courses. One similarity is that a business owner can never know too much about the business and there is always room for growth, no matter how long the business has been running. They both also discussed how customers are likely to change their mind and how to believe in what you’re selling.

Which part of the sales cycle are sales professionals typically the weakest? Based on the wisdom shared in “Preparing for a Career in Sales,” what specific tips/areas do you think will be most important for you to remember/work on personally?

The weakest part of the sales cycle is usually the presales process. Practicing will help to remember the process the best. It will help you to always be on your game and ready to prospect your customers and strategize accordingly.

2. Sandler Training: Which training/webinar topic did you watch? Why does the topic you learned about, matter? How will it help you in your career?

I watched Selling Through Supply Chain Delays. I chose this topic because it is important to everyone right now as a business and as a consumer. It is important because prospects are getting less and less patient and willing to wait for a product. It is creating a cascade effect and it is hard to forecast what the future shipping charges will be and when a product will be available again. There are also a number of workforce challenges and customers are not always willing to wait. It makes it very important to anticipate the customer’s future needs and empathize with the lack of product availability in the preset times. Things like this can help the customer to gain trust in you and try to react proactively instead of reactively and don’t give push back or become defensive about supply issues. When they see you on their side, it is powerful in changing the dynamic of the interaction.

3. SalesPower Webinar: What is one key takeaway or strategy you gleaned? How could you apply/practice what you learned? Did you connect with anyone from the webinar on LinkedIn and/or write a thank you? 😉

Overhead as a metric that is necessary. Which items will need to be meetings and which can be an email will be key to the balance of quality and quantity. Having enough employees that are effective and not stuck in unnecessary meetings will help qualified sales associates connect with qualified buyers. I can apply what I learned by using the proper training channels with associates between meetings and trainings to keep developing sales associates to align with the business needs to improve interactions with prospects. I did not connect with anyone after the Webinar.