Blog Post 7: Marketing: The Gap Between Expectations and Reality (And Knowing When To Revise A Plan)

            It never ceases to amaze me how despite research, testing, and the use of traditional, time-tested, tactics, reality may be completely different than our expectations. Regardless of how prepared we are and how we act in order to bring about expected results, there is always room for unanticipated outcomes. This semester I learned that Marketing is no exception to this rule. My class used an online simulation to create and sell a backpack; though the simulation was not a perfect example of real-world marketing, it showed me how difficult marketing truly is. Through undesired effects that seemed to spite my by-the-book use of classical pricing strategies and promotion tactics, I learned that marketing actions do not always bring about the results one desires and expects them to. More importantly, I was able to learn from this example of the volatility of markets and consumer's reactions to products and promotion of those products. There's a popular quote from author Charles Swindle that goes, "Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it. " I think that this quote almost perfectly sums up my findings with respect to the divide between expectations and reality in marketing; it seems that what's more important than getting expected results from actions is the ability to bounce back after unexpected/undesired results to actions.

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           During my class backpack simulation, I witnessed first hand failure despite an almost formulaic approach to marketing. After conducting research to find the target market with the most growth potential as well as a fitting price and design for this market, my team and I created a backpack targeted at university students, including environmentally friendly features to address their earth-concious preferences, as well as pricing around the amount of money they were willing to pay. Despite selecting a target market that had promising growth, as well as keeping this target market's preferences in mind when it came to design, and staying around their price point, my group's backpack failed to generate a profit for our company. We tried all of the classic marketing techniques when it came to pricing. We started at market price then tried price skimming to cover high initial production and promotion costs. This price tactic did not bode well. We then tried below-market pricing, or penetration pricing to attract price sensitive students who want a cheaper backpack. Unfortunately this tactic also failed; perhaps due to the psychological phenomenon that a cheaper price is an indication of a lesser quality good. What ever the reason, we couldn't find a price that appealed to students. After 5 quarters of failure we realized that it was time to "react" and came to the conclusion that we needed to target a less crowded market with a new backpack design. The market proved to be more volatile and unpredictable than we had expected it to be.

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            Unfortunately, we were far from out of the woods. Our next shortcoming came in the form of promotion. As we learned in our marketing class, promotion is key to creating awareness of a brand or product, and in turn, gaining sales. I suppose my team and I struggled with striking a balance. Some people say that you can "never have too much of a good thing," however, when it comes to advertising, we learned that this is not always the case. Although we expected that heavy initial spending on promotion would lead to buzz marketing which would be free and allow us to cut back on paid advertisements, we never got to this comfortable and inexpensive place with our advertising. This was not the worst of our promotion problems though. As we increased our levels of promotion we did not see equal reach of our ads to customers. At one point we spent nearly $8,000 on marketing that really did not gain us all that many new customers. We found that sometimes its best to abandon such plans of wide outreach, and cut costs by simply trying to reach a smaller number of customers more likely to purchase the product.  Once again,  the market proved to be extremely capricious. 

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               I suppose the takeaway from the simulation portion of my marketing course was that things really don't always go as planned. While marketing tactics do work, and plans are wonderful to have, there is a certain amount of unpredictability and elements outside a company's control. I learned that it is critical to be able to analyze sales outcomes and be willing and able to abandon one strategy or plan for another. Adaptability proved key in successful marketing efforts.

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