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Solving your marketing challenge in 3 hours or less. It CAN be done!

Last week I had the pleasure of accompanying a group of students to Montreal, Quebec in Canada as their coach, to compete in the Vanier Case Challenge. This annual competition draws on the best and brightest from 33 university colleges nationwide to test their mettle in applying marketing analysis and presentation skills in a 3 hour pressure cooker simulation. They present their solution to a panel of industry experts and university professors during a 20 minute presentation and 5 minute question and answer time period.  But before getting down to work, we did a little team building, exposing some who had never skated before to frozen waterway skating in minus 20 degrees! There’s nothing quite like a field of white before you in peaceful silence, being broken only by the sound of a gliding blade across snow-covered ice.

Montreal_team_skateBack at the competition the students delivered their personal best, but in the end were not one of the 6 teams out of 33 to advance to the second round on day two. There was a lot of excellent work presented that day that didn’t make it through. The real accomplishment was to have represented their college in such a highly regarded competition in the first place. Plus, there’s always next year! Essentially those teams did in 3 hours what I do for clients over several weeks in a consulting contract. Now there’s a humbling thought!

The process that my team was coached through is one all marketing managers and entrepreneurs could benefit from. Let’s have a closer look at the steps:

  1. Situation analysis: What are the known facts? What are our internal strengths and weaknesses? What are our external opportunities and threats? What possible strategies exist to combine strengths and opportunities? Strengths and threats? Mitigate weaknesses and opportunities? Mitigate weaknesses and threats? What time frame and budget constraints are we working within?
  1. Competitive landscape: Who are our primary and secondary competitors? How are they positioned? What is the bargaining strength of our buyers and suppliers? Is there a threat of substitute or new entrants?
  1. Our positioning: What is our unique selling proposition? – what we do that our competitors don’t, that our target market cares about, that is not easily copied? What segments of the market do we serve? Who is our target market? Where are we in the product lifecycle? Are we leaders? Followers? Challengers? Or nichers?
  1. The problem or opportunity: Stated simply, what problem or opportunity are we addressing?
  1. Alternatives: Given responses to the many questions above, what are some possible directions we could take? Specific actions to solve our problem? Specific actions to realize the opportunity?
  1. Evaluate, select and justify: What criteria should we consider to evaluate alternatives? – Cost? Profit? Customer satisfaction? Market share? Resources? Values? There are many possibilities.
  1. Execution: How would our recommended plan be executed? – Who would do what? When? And how? How would it reflect in our product or service? Price? Promotion? Distribution? What specific actions would be taken each quarter? How would we allocate our budget? Finally, how would we measure success?

I know, that’s a lot of questions…

If you have a business problem or opportunity you’re facing, try going through some of these questions to approach it in a methodical way. And if you’d like some guidance in the process, or to just have someone do it for you, give me a call. Triage and a remedy can be bought!

 

Mary Charleson

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