Week 8- The Plan

Week 8: MARKETING PLAN

This week's focus was getting the team together to formulate our group marketing plan.  Just like the real world, our biggest challenge was getting everyone together at the same time and finding a way to effectively communicate.  All of our team members usually meet face to face but for the past week, only one of the four was able to make it to class, the rest of us attended "virtually".  

This presented a real challenge for us and I can honestly say that I find the "on-line chat" method of holding meetings to be extremely frustrating and difficult to follow.... Unlike most students, I hate texting and avoid it as much as possible. That being said, my hat is off to my team-mates who seemed to navigate the "chat" world effortlessly.  I was very impressed with the efficiency in communicating complex ideas.

Our team's approach was to share our individual situation analyis' and review them in detail.  It was very interesting to see the similarities and differences.  I felt that my understanding of the company performance was significantly improved by reviewing my team-mates perspectives.

Our first step towards completing the Marketing Plan was to  agree on a key issues and a mission statement.  Rightly so, there was a lot of dialog at this point because it is the basis of vision, strategy and tactics.  Once this was agreed upon, we all agreed to take a stab at the Market vision and goals.  We the  met and discussed these in detail.  At this point, we had our basic plan and agreed to break up the balance of the report for efficiency and assign different segments to each team member.  We then consolidated our thoughts and generated our report.

Lessons learned:

- give more time for on-line chats

- have agreed upon objectives BEFORE a chat starts

- Leave a lot more time for the group consolidation of the report- here we had an attack of Murphy's law as at 10:45, the person who was assembling the final version, had the document crash and had to re-assemble the consensus material with very little time to spare.