-: Hello and welcome to Situational Analysis
video lecture part one.
So the agenda for this three part video is,
first we're gonna talk about what is marketing.
We're gonna run through situational analysis,
and then we're gonna talk about how to find
and evaluate an opportunity
for your business or organization.
So let's start with this.
What is marketing?
It's part of the title of this class.
I like to think of it as the activities which create
and retain customers,
and that it's not just selling products.
There's so much more to it than that.
The marketing scholar, Frederick Crane
talks about how it's delivering value
and managing customer relationships.
And for me, it's like the old saying, make new friends,
but keep the old.
That it's important to bring new customers to yourself.
But maintaining and taking good care of the old ones
is at least as important, if not more than finding new ones.
Good marketing means creating and articulating value.
And this is a very simple equation
where you can think about
the value being equal
to on the top perceived benefits.
What's good about you?
How do you create value?
How do you solve a need?
How do you solve a want?
How do you make 'em happy?
How do you do things better,
versus the cost?
Both, what does it cost them in money,
but in time, in effort, in search, in lots of other ways.
So think broadly about what can be benefits
and what can be costs within this model.
One word, one set of words of wisdom I have
is that if you ask an entrepreneur
who will buy your product?
And they say, everyone, maybe that sounds great,
but in fact it's a sign of a great danger.
There are very few,
if any products,
that everyone buys.
That good marketing implies
putting your advertising
and such in front of the right folks,
people that are likely
to buy it so you don't spread yourself too thin.
And we're gonna talk about that a lot more later
on in the class.
In fact, you wanna find a target market,
that group that's going to to be interested
and likely to buy
or support you.
And another way of thinking about it is,
if you chase too many rabbits,
you may not,
you'll lose the trail and won't get any rabbits.
So it's important to find the right one.
One of the models
that we'll be using throughout this class
is the classic 4P marketing mix.
The the four Ps are product, place, price, and promotion.
And in fact, we will spend
one week in the second half
of the class on each of these things.
And I have these photos
here as a joke
that one time I talked to a farmer, well,
"What are your four Ps?"
And he said, "Well, let's see.
Shell peas, snap peas,
sugar peas,
and world peas?"
Here again, is this graphic where we're thinking about,
now what are the external forces
and what are the opportunities that will help
to define your marketing plan.
So I wanna jump now to situational analysis,
and that is
the collection of data
and trends that will help you
to better understand how your business will perform.
And we're gonna think about both
the internal environment.
That's what you have a good deal of control over,
as well as the external environment,
the world in which you operate,
over which you have very little control.
So again, one way of thinking about it
is to do a rich description of both the internal
and external environments.
And here are a few things that you can think of
as you go through it.
On the internal side, whether your strengths and assets,
what are your partnerships?
What are the weaknesses?
And then on the external, well, what are the opportunities?
What are the threats?
What are the dangers?
I think it's important.
So the last box
that you can't see there is performance.
I took this from one of my mentors,
from my former job at Michigan State,
and he talked about how important it is
that when you begin
or operate a business, how important it is
that you start from a realistic
and accurate view of the world.
What are the assumptions and beliefs that you believe
underpin your business?
Because,
too often we jump right to operations,
but if you have the the right assumptions,
then you can develop strategies,
sort of big picture,
how you do things which you then translate
into the details, the operations.
And if all goes well,
you'll get the performance that you want.
Sadly, when people don't get the performance that they want,
they tend to look only at operations,
sort of tweak how you do things
instead of looking at the overall strategies,
which may be based on a faulty
set of assumptions and beliefs.
And no amount of operations
can overcome flawed strategies,
which are based on flawed assumptions and beliefs.
So we're gonna look at two models of this,
one being internal
and the rest being a combination
of in internal and external.
So I'll go through each one.
The first one just asks thar the five,
the W and one H question,
who, what, where, when, why, and how.
And we'll go through each one.
The first slide looks at who.
Who is the entrepreneur?
Who are you?
What drives them?
What are their passions?
What are their motives?
Why are they in this business?
And then what are their strengths and weaknesses?
What are their skills and assets?
What are some things where they will need team members
to shore up the weaknesses?
Another who question is, who is the customer?
Both the target ones as well as the current ones.
What questions
are,
what do you sell?
What's your product or service?
Where can I have two meanings?
First, where are you located?
What is your geography?
And what advantages
or disadvantages does this pose
as well as where.
How do the goods and services
get from you to the people who buy them?
Do you sell them directly?
Do or do you use intermediaries.
When question, or how long have you been in the business?
How's it changed?
And what stage of the business are you in?
Why
is a very important one?
What drives them?
What motivates them?
And what we learned about mission
and vision last week will probably
inform a lot of why as well.
How looks at their performance.
How are they doing?
How are they operationalizing these goals?
And one of the key concepts that we're going
to be discussing throughout class
is the position in the marketplace.
What is their marketing position?
Another model looks more broadly
at both the internal and external.
And it looks at these five Cs that you see here.
And again, I'll go through each one.
So when you describe the company,
you can look at its goals, mission, and vision.
What does it do?
What's its position, what's its performance?
It's very important to look at the competitors.
So what are their goals?
What are their strengths?
What do they do well?
Well, what's their output?
Where are they weakness and where are they vulnerable?
And where does it, how does that make space for you?
We want to think too,
and we're gonna spend a whole week on this,
but who buys your stuff?
What do they want and how, why, when and where do they buy?
We can think about,
and again, we're gonna spend a whole week on that.
How do we break up
this sort of everyone into segments?
And we do do that in at least three key ways,
demographic, geographic, and psychographic.
And I'll talk about each one.
And then thinking about how and when do folks buy?
When, is it for special occasions?
How much do they buy?
Do they buy often or,
sort of big trips all at once.
And how do you reach them?
Next is collaborators.
Those people that will help you do your job.
Who do you buy your inputs from?
Do you work with distributors?
Are they sort of strategic allies
or do you only have a buy and sell relationship?
And how do these either create or impede value?
You can also think of what are the networks that you use.
Maybe those that you're not directly engaged
in transactions with, but that you learn with,
that you collaborate with
and maybe people that you either get
or gained technical assistance from.
So that is the end of part one.
Thank you.