It's The Final Countdown!

Finally! September had arrived. I don't mean to sound to enthusiastic about the end of the semester coming, but fall is my absolute favorite time of the year. There's too many activities to be doing rather than sitting inside doing marketing assignments! But next week shall be our last... along with a couple of last assignments.

This week's material consisted of a variance analysis video instruction as well as a marketing metrics article. While both materials were very helpful in conducting our revised marketing plan, I must say that I wish we were assigned the marketing metrics reading much earlier in the course. This article gave some really great advice that I wish I had learned BEFORE getting into a lot of PharmaSim decision-making. It discussed how companies can't use every metric under the sun to evaluate the performance of the marketing team... there are just too many factors, too many details, and some that may not even be relevant or controllable by the marketing team. They also mentioned the importance of re-evaluating metrics annually. This is something that I don't think I would have thought of on my own. But like anything else in this life, change is inevitable. So it makes sense that you would want to re-evaluate which metrics your company is using to measure marketing efficiency.

Since I discussed most of our revision points in my last blog post, I will save you and I from the grief of re-reading and re-writing it all. Basically, we are choosing to stay with the same general objectives and strategies just with more lax "limits" on budgets, personnel, etc. We found that such tight restraints hindered any growth and success that could have been gained by breaking these limits. The only major change that we are deciding to make in the next few periods is the reformulation of our original Allround product. We found that doctors and pharmacist recommendations did not increase no matter how many detailers we added. It states in the case that health care providers dislike the "shotgun" approach of including many different active ingredients in one OTC medication. Therefore, we will be looking into reformulation options to make our product more attractive (such as dropping the alcohol from our product). 

One of the major points that our team was able to realize from the revision of our plan was that although our Allround product's market share has been on the slight decline, our Allright product was having extreme success in two short periods becoming the second most highly purchased allergy brand along with high pharmacist and doctor recommendations. This was an important distinction to make. In our first marketing plan, we identified one of our weaknesses to be our declining market share. However, as we learned throughout the semester, just because one product's market share is declining doesn't mean that the company as a whole is declining. We saw this with the introduction of our Allright product. By introducing the Allright product, Allstar was able to gain more market share (despite the falling market share of Allround). But yet this is what marketing research and the situation analysis is for... to find the strengths your company has, to visualize the opportunities available, to analyze the markets that are most attractive all in hopes to introduce something new to help your company continue to grow and be successful. Well I am glad to say, so far so good!

We will see where the next two periods take us with our new revised plan and hope for the best.

See you next week!
Jennie