MBA521

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Feb 20, 2024

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Essentials of Marketing Strategy Course Project – Instructions: In this project, you will identify your company’s marketing orientation, assess its marketing strategy, apply a framework to that strategy, and explore how you can improve an element of your company’s marketing ethics. Except as indicated, use this document to record all your project work and responses to any questions. At a minimum you will need to turn in a digital copy of this document to your instructor as part of your completed project. You may also have additional supporting documents that you will need to submit. Your instructor will provide feedback to help you work through your findings. Note: Though your work will only be seen by those grading the course and will not be used or shared outside the course, you should take care to obscure any information you feel might be of a sensitive or confidential nature. Complete each project part as you progress through the course. Wait to submit the project until all parts are complete. Begin your course project by completing Part One below. A Submit Assignment button can be found on the Part Four course project assignment page. Information about the grading rubric is available online on any of the course project assignment pages online. Do not hesitate to contact your instructor if you have any questions about the project. 1 LSM521: Essentials of Marketing Strategy. Strategy Cornell SC Johnson College of Business © 2019 eCornell. All rights reserved. All other copyrights, trademarks, trade names, and logos are the sole property of their respective owners.

PARTS ONE A AND ONE B Establishing a Marketing Mentality and Orientation ___________________________________________________________________ In Part One A of the course project, you will assess how effectively your firm has established a marketing mentality and orientation, and you will consider tactics you can use to develop (or improve on) your firm’s efforts. Answer the questions below. Briefly describe your customer wants and needs. How is your firm providing for or responding to those wants and needs? I am a government employee, and my firm does not offer a product or service that is open for purchase to the public. For the purposes of this assignment, I will be using Apple. Apple is an innovative firm offering consumer electronics. Apple customers are looking for the next big thing in technology ranging from computers to cell phones, and wearables. Consumers in this spectrum are looking for technology that offers good performance, easy to use, solves many day-to-day problems and is fashionable; many treat is as a luxury good. Apple is a company that meets wants and needs flawlessly. It is built around a functional organization which provides deep expertise to each aspect of the product or service bringing things to consumer that exceed expectations. They are normally ahead of trends or are setting trends in the industry. Describe how your product or service is better than that of your competitors. In what ways are your rivals’ products or services better than yours? Are any of these differences likely to change soon? Apple devices are built from the ground up by the design team, focusing on appealing to the senses in ways other brands don’t. They are better engineered and offer more utility based on the organization’s focus to be consumer centric at all times. For example, Apple’s camera team is comprised of 40 engineers alone, employing some of the most talented people in this spectrum as part of their development team (Podolny et al, 2020). One of their pillars which brings robust marketing orientation to this aspect of business is deep expertise, so the customer receives the work of some of the greatest minds across all the business units at Apple. Rivals products or services are not better per se, they are simply different. One of the reasons for this is that Apple is setting the pace for many other brands to follow suit and copy-cat products can be detrimental to those brands when consumers assimilate something that looks like Apple, but doesn’t perform like Apple. Companies like Samsung are therefore being forced to be innovative, taking on more 2 LSM521: Essentials of Marketing Strategy. Strategy Cornell SC Johnson College of Business © 2019 eCornell. All rights reserved. All other copyrights, trademarks, trade names, and logos are the sole property of their respective owners.

risk, like Samsung with a folding screen phone. For the most part, Apple structure built around a functional organization makes it difficult for other companies to mirror, where it might be cash- prohibitive to replicate. Instead, other companies simple focus on their own identity seeing how difficult it would be to replicate the magnitude of Apple’s consumer orientation. How focused is your company on the needs and wants of consumers, as compared to the need to sell specific goods or services and/or make a specific margin/profit? One of the key elements in how the company does this is being ensuring that the design team is isolated from any other business unit. When products at Apple are made, no one is telling designers at any level what they can or can’t do. In this way, constraints from manufacturing, logistics, finance, or any other similar business units are simply solved downstream, rather than present obstacles to those shaping what consumers want and need. There are no limitations in this sense, except those presented by the mind. After the product is designed and vetted for sale, then those who are experts in those realms are tasked with ensuring the volumes are met. This is done with innovative marketing and sales campaigns and partnership with some of the best cell carriers that can match the devices performance. When you pair subject matter expertise at all levels, the likelihood of failing when it comes to meeting margins and profits in minimized when the business offers products and services unlike any other. How do you think a marketing orientation fits into your larger company and marketing strategy? In the long run, organizations must have a strategy that addresses short and long term needs. Building a strategy that supports short and long term needs alike requires alignment across the organization where everyone is a marketer. In this sense, Apple has been looked at as a mass marketer by several HBR journalist which summarize the organizations ability to offer products and services that people want and need, and top it off beautifully with robust marketing campaigns that really push incremental sales beyond projections year over year and continue giving the firm new business (Frick et al, 2014) showing how the firm can have a balanced market and consumer orientation. Consider whether your firm shows any signs of marketing myopia. If so, what are they? If not, how can you be sure? Offer evidence in support of your claim. Being a public organization can place the burden on business to focus on selling instead of 3 LSM521: Essentials of Marketing Strategy. Strategy Cornell SC Johnson College of Business © 2019 eCornell. All rights reserved. All other copyrights, trademarks, trade names, and logos are the sole property of their respective owners.

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marketing. I believe Apple’s functional organization addresses marketing myopia by allowing business units to have deep expertise and collaborative debate which strikes balances in the firm when it comes to offering a product for the purpose of selling something versus offering a product for the purpose of helping consumer solve problems with their solution. Since Apple balances both on the surface, the symptoms are not nearly as prevalent but as a publicly traded company, there are pressures on maintaining margins and reaching profit which means if the firm doesn’t maintain focus it can quickly develop a framework to miss serving the consumer. In Part One B of the course project, you will consider how to ensure that all levels of your firm are market-oriented. Answer the questions below. How do you strike a balance between internal sales, margin and cost-of-goods-sold goals vs. long- term goals of building brand and customer loyalty? Apple has one of the largest consumer loyalty pools and lifetime values. It has developed this by offering solutions to many problems other brands did not address where they focused explicitly towards consumers strictly from a cashflow standpoint only. When you focus on the consumer at the heart of the organization, internal sales, margins, and COGS goals occur more organically than they otherwise would when you chase profits and consumers see right through this. This makes it easier for organizations to build momentum and not have to work as hard to capture the last mile of business to meet financial objectives. Clayton Christensen’s Jobs to be Done gives this concept of business meaning, where focusing on reasons why consumer hire (buy) products or services to solve problems for them is a primary function for any organization, otherwise it gives products/services and firm very little circularity to any business lifecycle. Do you think marketing is an independent function or is it integrated throughout your organization? Give an example to support your assessment. Everyone in the organization needs to be taught how to be a marketer and think downstream. There are many ways of looking at products or services but if there is not a leadership team who can examine team behaviors and challenge the status quo for complacency then organizations can crumble in the long run. For these reason, marketing should never be an independent function and Apple strives to fulfill role responsibility where everyone is a marketing, thinking broadly about how the products or services fit needs first, wants second, and resolve many day 4 LSM521: Essentials of Marketing Strategy. Strategy Cornell SC Johnson College of Business © 2019 eCornell. All rights reserved. All other copyrights, trademarks, trade names, and logos are the sole property of their respective owners.

to day problems for consumers. From the inception of the product, finding elements that align with consumer needs down to the store ambience and training & development Apple Geniuses are given to ensure continuity up and down the firm and where market orientation always comes second. Can the marketing department develop stronger relationships with other departments in your organization, such as sales? If so, what are some ways that you can start connecting your marketing department to other departments? Building stronger relationships, internally and externally should always be a firms goal. From this standpoint, marketer are advocates of the bottom line just as much as those in sales. There is deep expertise, immersion to details, and collaborative debate as the three operating pillars which shape the relationships in the firm top to bottom and give the continuity that’s needed to ensure no one loses sight of sales or the consumer. As noted however, a firms long term orientation can be shaped by coaching everyone to be a marketer, focusing on making things and thinking of them downstream meaning everyone must be thinking about how a product or service are going to be sold. PART TWO Assessing Your Company’s Marketing Strategy ___________________________________________________________________ Now that you have spent some time thinking about your marketing strategy in the short-term, you will analyze it in terms of its long-term qualities. Answer the questions below. What is the value proposition of your organization: To your employees? To your current customers? To potential new customers? As one of the most innovate brands, Apple relies on talented employees to convey their brand. The company focuses on 3 pillars where their employees are a big part of building a consistent brand message. Podolny describes the company as a functional organization around 3 pillars for success - deep expertise, immersion to detail, and collaborative debate. These elements are the foundation of building brand equity where the company leverages the most talented people in 5 LSM521: Essentials of Marketing Strategy. Strategy Cornell SC Johnson College of Business © 2019 eCornell. All rights reserved. All other copyrights, trademarks, trade names, and logos are the sole property of their respective owners.

their given areas of expertise to put this complex puzzle together. As such, the value proposition is widely aligned towards their employees, current and future customers as a commitment to excellence and providing some of the most innovate and disruptive products. How do you currently use your marketing strategy and products/services to deliver that value proposition? The management team at Apple uses 3 pillars to create consistency in the brand through the workforce. These elements are deep expertise, immersion to detail, and collaborative debate. Through deep expertise the company produces programs and inherently products and services that derive excellence in their work, a major component in their brand equity. The company emphasizes immersion to detail as an element of their brand consistency which tells the workforce to challenge the status quo and focus on things that others don’t. Their design team is separate from the rest of the entity at Apple so there’s no constraints in the process, and no one saying that things can’t be done. As an example, to this program, when the iPod was first launched a group of engineers approached Jobs with the device, and he expressed to them that is was too big. The engineers expressed to him that they had used up all usable space and Jobs tossed it in a fish tank in his office. When bubbles surfaced, Jobs pointed out that there’d be no bubbles if that they were saying was true, so the engineering team went back to the drawing board. Lastly, collaborative debate is a method used by the company to openly discuss all concerns, so long as they are constructive in nature with the intent that there are favorable outcomes (HBR, 2020). This framework speaks to the inclination to excellence from Apple all the way from the ground up and directly into the customer experience ultimately a derivation of their value proposition to the consumer. Offer your ideas for improving your marketing strategy. What do you think are the key areas for improvement? I think that Apple being a technology company imposes a barrier to more traditional market segment, like those who still enjoy mailers or print media which is an avenue rarely pursues. Instead, Apple leaves this aspect of the business open for top notch carriers like Verizon and T- Mobile instead of US cellular and similar, or retail partners like Best-Buy instead of radio shack to pursue these avenues on their behalf. By giving this channel less attention, Apple likely passes 6 LSM521: Essentials of Marketing Strategy. Strategy Cornell SC Johnson College of Business © 2019 eCornell. All rights reserved. All other copyrights, trademarks, trade names, and logos are the sole property of their respective owners.

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on market share and leaves to chance, like when competing through carrier and retailer promotions, rather than facing it head on and working through the gripe of what it would look like to capture a less technologically sophisticated consumer base. By targeting this demographic, the company can improve the effectiveness of their marketing strategy. How does your strategy help you sustain competitive advantage over time? I believe the company already does this well by continuing to trust their process. By means of the 3 pillars used to create a functional organization, Podolny suggest the company creates “one voice” which brings a framework for continuity to the purpose of the company and brand equity, resonating inside and outside of the organization. Overtime, this has really helped them continue to grow YoY. PART THREE Choosing a Framework for Your Marketing Strategy ___________________________________________________________________ In this part of the course project, you will use one of the frameworks discussed in the corresponding module to evaluate your product or service. Choose whichever framework best suits your needs. Answer the questions below. Describe your organization’s key mission. What are the firm’s strengths and weaknesses? What are its market objectives? Apple’s key mission is a derivative of its 3 pillars focused on bringing excellence top to bottom. The organization’s commitment to offer the best of the best and still meet each consumer’s unique needs are a guiding principle towards long term goals and is paramount to its continued success. Its’s mission is comprised of 3 core components as well – provide the best user experience, offer innovative products, and exceptional delivery of its products. Customer services is at the root of the organization. The firm’s market objective are broad as they strive to capture market share, but as a technology firm with such a large foot print, focusing on the environment is a large component to their long term strategy as well as means to continue existing. Their strengths lie predominantly on the brand and the company’s identity, financial performance, and IP, daring to be different. Their weakness however lies specifically in their narrow product lines, focusing on very specific 7 LSM521: Essentials of Marketing Strategy. Strategy Cornell SC Johnson College of Business © 2019 eCornell. All rights reserved. All other copyrights, trademarks, trade names, and logos are the sole property of their respective owners.

consumer electronics categories, and they are facing a very volatile global environment which is presenting the organization with new & unprecedented challenges, where they’re not prepared. Who are the customers and consumers that you're thinking about targeting? Why have you identified those particular customers and consumers? Apple has a few identities that have helped position the firm well for a broader audience. There are customers who specifically come to Apple to have their needs met using technology for solutions. The firm is position to appeal predominantly to mid to high incomes, a female majority first, Caucasian between 18 and 35 as their ideal customer. From this, there are other segments that share similar identities however Apple has done well with a broader focus for mid-higher incomes and ages 18-45. This demographic of customers is not vastly different than those of its consumers, though its fan base has helped the organization reach into segments the company did not initially pursue. One of the firm’s deficiencies in their marketing mix is leaving print media out which reduces consumer segments, largely because the firm cannot effectively convey its purpose through this channel effectively therefore diminishing the firms efforts and inherently its returns. These customers and consumers in particular have not only been identified by the firm as the most receptive groups, but the group has responded very positively to this engagement from the firm, making the products and services, and the relationship mutually attractive for the firm and its fans. What rival firms are pursuing the same customers and consumers? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What are their assets? What might their objectives be? Apple plays domestically and globally with just a few player. One of Apple’s biggest competitors is Samsung, and they are pursuing the same demographic largely because this market demographic is the largest consumer base that’s actively engaging in purchases or has high purchase intentions. Samsung, however, does not have deep expertise in the same product categories like Apple does, but they have a longer and deeper relationship with consumers and frequently leverage this trust to try and bring consumers back into the brand. Samsung is also a larger global competitor and dominates in many Asia-pacific markets across other categories where Apple cannot even compete, giving Samsung an upper hand from this standpoint and allowing it to leverage these conditions as intangible assets when it comes to doing business in these environments. Use the space provided below to discuss the framework you chose: 8 LSM521: Essentials of Marketing Strategy. Strategy Cornell SC Johnson College of Business © 2019 eCornell. All rights reserved. All other copyrights, trademarks, trade names, and logos are the sole property of their respective owners.

Porter’s Five Forces is a model that can help a firm like Apple identify and analyze 5 competitive forces that shape industries, helping showcase strengths and weaknesses in a firm. It can also help a firm shape its corporate strategy when it comes to understanding the level of competition within an industry and provide leader with guidance specific to the firms long term orientation and profitability by highlighting the competition, new entrants, suppliers, customers and threats that substitutes present in the market. Which framework did you select? Why did you choose this framework? Porter’s Five Forces is a more appropriate framework for understanding Apple’s business standing, primarily because they are frequently at the top from many aspects and therefore they have to work even harder to remain relevant, frequently scanning the competitive environment and preparing to mitigate all aspects of their competition as Porter would describe it from a multifaceted approach working to understand things deeply. As examples, remaining relevant in the Asia-pacific market is key where companies like Huawei as making progress on market share and developing consumers of their own. Similarly, mitigating production issue in China that have allowed the firm to scale deeply, but is now transitioning towards Vietnam due to political unrest as a byproduct of covid regulations. As another example, substitution poses a large threat to the firm. With rising costs and interest, consumers look towards more attractive alternatives where their core needs are met for a fraction of the prices. What did you learn? The marketing strategy is vastly broader than it seems. There needs to be careful consideration for many elements of business that can be frequently overlooked. From the standpoint of Apple, businesses must build their process and trust it, giving circularity to its thought process and working to understand the playing fields and those factors that can influence it, from any standpoint, and to include politics, finance, environmental, social & governance and other similar factors that can have deep implications for a business if they go without being examined. How will you change your strategy based on what you’ve learned? 9 LSM521: Essentials of Marketing Strategy. Strategy Cornell SC Johnson College of Business © 2019 eCornell. All rights reserved. All other copyrights, trademarks, trade names, and logos are the sole property of their respective owners.

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As a government employee transitioning into the general public, the one key takeaway is that everyone needs to be a marketer. For several reasons, it is part of our obligation when serving a business to be thinking broadly and downstream, anticipating behaviors and creating programs that can help firms overcome ambiguity simply by having a well thought out plan. PART FOUR Evaluating Your Marketing Ethics __________________________________________________________________ In this part of the course project, you will evaluate your organization’s marketing ethics and create an action plan to improve one ethics approach at your organization. Take five to ten minutes and think about your organization’s approach to marketing. Consider the marketing strategies and tactics your organization currently uses and how they are executed in the marketplace. Also consider any and all professional and legal guidelines that govern the marketing of your organization’s product or service. Finally, think about any ethical gray areas regarding marketing in general and specifically marketing your organization’s product or service. Once you’ve reflected on these questions, determine one element of your organization’s approach to marketing that could be improved from an ethical perspective. Use that point to fill out the action plan below. Opportunity to develop company ethics Identify one key opportunity to develop company ethics and explain why you selected it. How do you see this as being worthy of attention? A key element in Apple’s development of company ethics is transparency in data integrity & consent to collecting that data. I believe this is an opportunity to build on its unparalleled brand by giving consumers more power and trust back. We are living in an environment that’s full of ambiguity and we’re often filling in the blanks. When a business decides to operate more ethically, that’s to say be transparent about the affairs that are important to people, other elements of the business are addressed organically. Doing business from a place of trust can have an even more profound effect on a firm’s long-term orientation. Strategies Identify the strategies you plan to use to develop this opportunity. Educating consumers can be very difficult, primarily because of the environment that we’ve created for firms who try to operate ethically but are met with legal implications. One strategy that Apple can implement in its efforts to be more transparent for example, is disclosing information to the consumer beyond the 10 LSM521: Essentials of Marketing Strategy. Strategy Cornell SC Johnson College of Business © 2019 eCornell. All rights reserved. All other copyrights, trademarks, trade names, and logos are the sole property of their respective owners.

fine print. This can be done by summarizing agreements in language that most people can understand but still protecting the firm. Another way of being more transparent is conveying to consumers how they became part of a marketing campaign; I speak to people who frequently believe their phone was listening in on them where they were talking to someone about things they never searched and immediately following a conversation there are ads offering similar things to the conversation. Explaining these behaviors can foster trust from a place that’s very important to consumer, such as privacy. Steps What are the specific actions you will take to prepare to use these strategies? Be as specific as you can in outlining how you will overcome potential obstacles. Create campaigns that highlight core problems. Start with existing customers for which Apple has a complete profile for and test campaigns for effectiveness. Do not allow consumers to just “agree to terms”. Consumers should have to answer several questions from “summary points” before they are allowed to close out terms and conditions. Tell the consumer in a few words exactly what they are opting in form. Put privacy before a need. Put programs in place to educate consumers on their practices; software updates for example should not have features that are blanketed under other previous consent. Give consumers the power to know, even if it might be cumbersome. When people feel others are acting in their best interest, there is a lot of equity for the firm in the form of loyalty. Create short clips of a person conveying what’s happening (by video) directly on a screen. Timeline Identify a timeline for implementation. What will you do right away? What will you implement over a longer timeline? Programs like this can be timely to design and more so to be effective. There are many things Apple can do right away and mainly because they have direct access to their customers where so many devices are in operation. In the first three months, the firm can explain its purpose, conveying to the consumer how important their privacy is, and even more so when it comes to having consent from them (the customers). In the long run, Apple can create a program that is designed explicitly to communicate to their customer via the update app exactly what is happening, why it’s happening. Right now, people are not exactly flocking to be well informed, so the easier the firm makes it, the easier it will be for consumers and customers alike to trust the firm and more forward with change even if they don’t agree entirely sometimes. Measurement/Results Trust in a place of business can bring on a range of other things. Apple’s focus continues to surround market share as one of the 11 LSM521: Essentials of Marketing Strategy. Strategy Cornell SC Johnson College of Business © 2019 eCornell. All rights reserved. All other copyrights, trademarks, trade names, and logos are the sole property of their respective owners.

How are you going to measure your results or demonstrate that your efforts have had a positive impact? Outline your measurement strategies here. biggest players in the tech world. It is also publicly traded so short-term gains are essential to the firm. From this standpoint then, one of the key drivers that the firm is aligning with customer and consumer needs is winning incremental sales and taking market share from its competitors. This can comes in the form of immediate sales, or simply increased purchased intentions a the firms continues to do business, many of these elements will materialize financially, as the firm intended by design. ___________________________________________________________________ To submit this assignment, please refer to the instructions in the course. 12 LSM521: Essentials of Marketing Strategy. Strategy Cornell SC Johnson College of Business © 2019 eCornell. All rights reserved. All other copyrights, trademarks, trade names, and logos are the sole property of their respective owners.

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