Resources / Ripples & Wipeouts

This week in Bonnie’s marketing class, each sub-group from the landscape analysis team and marketing audit team had the chance to share their findings with the whole class.  Each group presented what they considered the three most important conclusions from their research.  What I found interesting about this exercise was that for the first time through this whole process, it started to become apparent how it all fits together. 

Although each sub-group was focusing on something very different, as each group presented their findings you could see similarities and differences, creating a good overall story.  The similarities among groups are good, because it shows that we are all on the right track in our research.  However, the differences are, in my opinion, even more important, because I think it gives a clear picture of how complex putting together a marketing plan will be, and gives us plenty of details to work with.

At the end of class we were given two tasks to complete during the week.  The first was to finish our written write-up of our research so that Bonnie could put it all together, and the second was for each of us to decide what we consider are the three most important concepts that need to go into our messaging.  In looking at my notes, after all of the sub-groups shared their findings, we were left with 18 conclusions.  I am excited to see what the class decides are the three most important concepts for messaging.  And what will be even more interesting will be to see whether those three concepts fit well with the positioning statement that we “finalized” last week.

Now that we are about halfway through the semester, I think it is a good time to look back and see how far our class has come.  When we started the class none of us had ever even heard of GPFA, and most of us had absolutely no experience with doing marketing of any kind.  But now, working as a team, we not only know what a marketing audit and landscape analysis are, but we have actually completed both of them for GPFA. 

Tune in next week to hear more about our progress.

--Kelly Scott