Week 3 - Using marketing research to gain consumer insights

Does your company use research to understand it's customer's?  What type of research? 

My company is one of the leading technology and transformation programs for insurance industry in North America.

Since our market segment is business market, our company relies on the market research on technology and trends in insurance industry. Celent, Gartner and Novarica research companies provides a valuable insight into the insurance industry. These research companies provide valuable information that includes reports and briefs on market, operations, and technology trends. These reports are based on consumer and company executive survey data and interviews, the personal experience, and ongoing research.

 

Our company also uses this information to gain insight on the current position of competitors in the market and what differentiated services they are providing. 

 

What Insights does Dr. Rosling gain from the data collection and analysis he conducts in the video.  How important is the visual display of data in creating these insights? 

The presentation from Dr. Rosling was very impressive. The animated bubble chart provided a compact yet simplified view of the economic, and social trends of countries across the world for past 200 years. The detailed segmentation provided great insight on the diversity of economic and social trends within a country.   Human mind react faster, in fact 400,000 times faster, to visual stimuli than to text. The impactful presentation in Dr. Rosling's presentation proves the same with the use of animated visual aids.

 

Where will you go to collect data for your marketing plan? How can you learn about the type of consumers in the market you have been assigned.  How will you convey and provide insights to your client using this information?

For planning my marketing research, I will rely on the secondary research which includes existing information on the web for electric and hybrid car market, target consumer segment with demographic and geographic concentration, existing manufacturers/competitors in North America, anticipated future trends in the electric and hybrid car market and lifestyle of targeted consumer to identify right channel for advertising/positioning our products. Unfortunately all the websites I have visited so far provides paid reports like Pike Research, and Navigant research

Week 2 - Analyzing Current Situation

I work of an global IT company that provides technology solutions, insurance products and service across the globe. Our company serves the business market and below are some external factors that may impact our company

Economic Trend

Foreign exchange is one of the factors that will inadvertently impact our company. Since the company is based on offshore onsite model, the change in foreign exchange will impact the revenue and profit margin.

Technological Trends

Since we are IT shop this is the most critical factor that impacts our organization. Our North America division primarily focuses on providing industry leading product solution to insurance carries. Following are some of the technology trends that can impact our company like Aerial Digital imaging, Business Intelligence designed specifically for insurance industry, and mobility

Competitive Trends

Competitive trends, especially in the insurance product solution, includes speed to implementation, product capability in specialty lines of business and advance mobility solutions.

Company's mission

It is so surprising that I have worked in this company for past 12 years and yet I had to go look for the company's mission. I could not find official statement  but below is what I could find.

Build a valuable and evergreen Institution by sustained contribution and spotless reputation, success of every stakeholder, collaborative culture, and 100% responsibility for outcome.

Now that I have watched the video it makes sense that the marketing goals are broad. If I would have looked at this mission statement before watching the video, it would not have made any sense. Our company provides IT services as well as leading insurance product solutions to our customers. The mission statement talks strongly about the company culture, quality and customer experience of our organization.

What needs do the products of my company satisfy?

Our company offer insurance products like policy administration system that helps insurance carriers to launch new lines of business to stay competitive and sustain growth. The product also offers workflow automation to reduce underwriting effort hence reducing the operational cost of insurance carriers.

Week 1 - What is Marketing?

As per my understanding so far, Marketing in simple terms is a set of activities and strategies that organizations implement in order to make a product available that satisfies customer needs while making profit for the company.

In order to do so, the company needs to understand who the customers are, what are their needs, customer trends etc. by utilizing research and existing information from various sources. Customer today also expects the organizations to be transparent,  environment friendly, and have social responsibility. All this defines a perceived value of the organization and its product to a customer. To accomplish this desired value, organization needs to create a marketing plan and include set of organizational objectives and strategies.

Marketing Myopia reading was a great learning and eye opener for me. The reading poses a very interesting question for an organization. "What business we are really in?". The answer to this simple question can tell whether an organization is building a sustainable product that is oriented towards customer.

Video from Jeff Bezos is amazing. The video was short, concise,  and top-notch. I was amazed by the simplicity of the video in explaining powerful thoughts on how Amazon has created a huge market presence with high value customer oriented products and services using a short list of marketing principles. Below is the list.

1. Obsess over consumer - Pay attention to customer and work your way backwards to build quality product that are customer oriented. Relentless focus over customer helps realize errors while building a successful product/services for end users.
2. Invent - Invent on customer's behalf.  This is really important as many technology organizations organization forgets this and assumes technical superiority in itself will make the product more desirable.
3. Think long Term - Long term solution is necessary for an organization to create long lasting value. It will reap benefits for the customer right away but may take 5-7 yrs. for the company to realize benefits.
4. It's always day 1 - More inventions, more innovation and more ways to obsess over consumers. This provides the organization tendency to react and improve its products and services to remain competitive in the market and better serve the customers.

Introduction

This is my learning blog for C570 Strategic Marketing Management.

To introduce myself, I am an IT professional with total of 12 years of experience in IT services and insurance product solution. I am completely new to marketing world and through this course I intend on grasping the concepts of strategic marketing and build my basic learning foundation.

I am also scared of public writing and hope to conquer my fear through this course; Not that this is my excuse of starting late on the blog ;) .