Week 7 - February 22, 2012

Update:

So I posted the post for last week today. I actually just finished writing it, sorry.

So this past weekend and the last couple days I was doing some reading for my online Management class. It was nice and interesting to see how the text and subject matter for the first few chapters tied together with classes I have had and the classes I am having now. I think I'm starting to see how my classes tie together and how they are preparing me for the future. I don't see how everything works, but I thought it was interesting that I was starting to see some ties.

OK, sorry this is so late. So we went over chapter 9 in the text last week. Product concepts. A quote I liked from class "the foundation of marketing is a product".  As the midterm was coming up we talked about concepts from previous classes a bit too, but not much. "A product unknown to the potential buyer or a known product that the buyer does not actively seek is referred to as an unsought product."(page 132 of the text book) I have a bit of a hard time with this, so I asked the Professor a question. They are different, an external force (ex an insurance sales man) pushes for the purchase. He would consider a washing machine breaking down to be a shopping product. I guess this makes sense and they did use that as an example in the book. I just got confused. So there are four kinds of products, Convenience, Shopping, Specialty, and Unsought. We also learned about branding. There was so much more too it than I thought there was. A product family is similar, an entire product line/width. Family brand is several different products.

We also talked about brand licensing and the pros and cons of doing so. Our video discussion was based on Kodak from a few years back. It was different, as several things have happened to Kodak since then. We had two presentations on YouTube. Something interesting is you can use your current Gmail account, but you have to sign in and not create an account like you normally would. This was interesting because as Google now owns Blogger and I was able to create an account using my Gmail/Google account to save some time and effort. But I couldn't do that with YouTube. Well not right away, I still need to finish setting up my account/channel on YouTube, so I have a basic account right now. I'm glad Professor Allen provides PDFs covering things we need to know but the book doesn't cover. This can make a big difference. I'll blog again later. Back to studying :)