Week 5- Smart Projects and Chapter 9

Week 5

Smart Projects

This week we did a lot of work on our Smart Projects. My team met on Sunday of last week. In this meeting we pooled our concept solutions together and created our top three solutions. We also revised our point of view statement during this meeting. I felt that we were very efficient during our meeting this week. We plan to meet again this coming Monday. An aspect of our reading that correlates heavily to our smart projects are target markets, which are discussed in Chapter 8. Knowing our target market was a vital part of establishing our point of view statement. It was also essential to create valuable concept solutions. Knowing our market is essential because it will allows us to create out product in a way that is most appealing to our largest market. Thursday we had a joint class with our team members. During this class we did a gallery walk of our updated point of view statements and of our three concept solutions. We received a lot of helpful feedback. I also feel like being able to walk around and view the other groups work was helpful to see how our work compares. Another aspect of our readings that applies here is the idea of knowing your competition.

Chapter 9

Chapter 9 is the assigned reading for this week. Chapter 9 is all about marketing research. Marketing research is the process of planning, collecting, and analyzing data relevant to a marketing decision. An essential aspect of marketing research is understanding that the marketplace is ever changing and it is important to keep up. The marketing research process is a seven step process. It is shown on the right. In short, the process includes defining a problem, collecting data, analyzing that data, and creating a report to solve the problem. Sometimes it is not even necessary to complete market research. At times it can be a waste of money if you will not gather any valuable information. For example, if a company is already very knowledgeable about their market and their customer's behaviors, then it would not be worth the money for them to conduct market research.

The World Around Us

Chapter 9 and our smart projects continue to teach me things about the world around me. Reading about market research makes me realize how many times I have been apart of a company's market research and not even known it. Every survey I have taken has been some form of data collection from a company. Once you learn about why the companies do this research and how the conduct it you look at these surveys and such in a different light. There is more value to them now because they now have a meaning that they lacked in my mind before this reading. Our smart projects continue to teach me how complex and difficult every product on the market is. The amount of effort that goes into creating a product was something I never could have understood without trying it first hand. It is a very complex and in depth process that requires a lot of time and effort.