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2.6 Discussion Questions and Activities

Discussion Questions

  1. Explain how a marketing objective differs from a marketing strategy. How are they related?
  2. Explain how an organization like McDonald’s can use licensing to create value for the brand.
  3. How has PepsiCo employed a product development strategy?
  4. Discuss how conducting a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis helps a firm (or an individual) develop its strategic plan.
  5. Describe the value propositions the social networking sites YouTube and Facebook offer Web users.

Activities

  1. Outline a strategic plan for yourself to begin planning for a job after graduation. Include your value proposition, targeted organizations, objectives, strategies, and the internal and external factors that may affect your plans.
  2. Assume you have an interview for an entry-level sales position. Write a value proposition emphasizing why you are the best candidate for the position relative to other recent college graduates.
  3. A mission statement outlines an organization’s purpose and answers the question of how a company defines its business. Write a mission statement for a campus organization.
  4. The Web site “My M&Ms” (http://www.mymms.com) allows customers to personalize M&M candies with words, faces, and colors and select from multiple packaging choices. Identify and explain the product market or market development strategies Mars pursued when it introduced personalized M&Ms.
  5. Explain how changing demographics and the social and cultural environment have impacted the health care industry. Identify new venues for health care that didn’t exist a decade ago. (Hint: emergency care services are available outside a hospital’s emergency room today.)
  6. Select an organization for which you would like to work. Look up its mission statement. What do you think the organization’s objectives and strategies are? What macro and micro environmental and internal factors might affect its success?
  7. Break up into teams. Come up with as many real-world examples as you can of companies that pursued market penetration, market development, product development, or diversification strategies. Explain what the company did and how successful you think each strategy will be.

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