MKTG 6101 Week 4 Surfing the Tsunami

 Chapter four of Surfing the Tsunami explains how to respond to artificial intelligence. As I've mentioned before you will do this by adapting. You can pay close attention to AI and see how to learn and grow. This will help you to adjust and become knowledgeable. You can do your own research to get more information about AI. You have to be consistent with your research and continue to learn throughout the process. 

I relate a lot to this phase of response to AI. I feel like as I do more research and continue to try to learn about a topic the more intrigued, I get. I start to feel more passionate about the subject as I focus more on understanding the background of it. If I force myself to actively study a subject, or actively try to learn more I care more about my growth involving it. 

MKTG 6101 Guerrilla Marketing Week 4

Developing a Plan

 Although we're not fully ready to launch our marketing campaign. It is important to know the plan you would like to start with and be prepared to commit to that plan. This is a great way to start off, and you can revise throughout your research. According to David Ogilvy, an important American advertising expertise, it is extremely important to position your product. This goes into fully understanding your product, goals, advantages, and your business. You should continuously ask yourself who your target market is because this will likely change throughout the process. Each target market you identify, will need a different aim. Now back to your position, ask yourself these four questions:

Does it offer a benefit that my target audience really wants?

Is it an honest-to-goodness benefit?

Does it truly separate me from my competition?

Is it unique and/or difficult to copy?

These questions help to identify where your position is at. If you are not satisfied with all four of these questions, continue searching. After you are satisfied with your position, you can start thinking about strategy. Levinson stated there are seven simple sentences that can help you create the proper strategy. These sentences talk about your purpose, how you're planning on achieving that, who your target market(s) are, what weapons you have, what your position stands for, your business' identity, and lastly your budget. These sentences allow you to completely identify your brand, and how you're planning on achieving success in a simple paragraph. Having a concise paragraph to describe your business is the best way to gain an audience. 

Once your marketing plan takes off you will have to face adversity. The markets are always changing, this could make you think you are failing, but in reality, this is time to evolve. Although it might not seem like it, people forget things and find new niches all the time; don't stop marketing. If you continue marketing correctly, you will strengthen your confidence and identity. Ultimately, if you continue through hard times, you will gain a loyal audience, improve morale, and have an advantage over your competitors. 

MKTG 6101 Ascend Your Start-Up Week 4

 What is adversity?

Adversity explains difficulties or bad luck that comes with life. You have to show courage to face adversity, and unfortunately everyone deals with it. Look for ways to evolve throughout adversity. 

Adversity is something you will deal with A LOT when starting up a new product or idea. Do not rely on marketing momentum, there is a lot you will have to work through during the start-up period. You have to identify and study your product market. This includes studying your competition, identifying your key players, and what strategy you are going to use to see acceleration in revenue. You have to learn how to create your perfect match with your distribution channel from the beginning, without this you will have issues going forward. This could create some confusion. You might wonder what the difference is between go-to-market strategy and product-market fit. Your go-to-market strategy is how you're planning on taking off and creating a successful product in a short period of time. Now a product-market fit is something you will work with and evolve throughout the stages of your products growth. This means your product is a good fit for the market that they are in. 

This week's micro-decisions:

What distribution channel will you build as a pathway to customers?

What is your pricing strategy?

How will you help your customer's customer scale and grow? 

Now that you know your brand, these decisions might seem a bit easier, but they will take a lot of thinking. You will have to create strategy based on the value of your product, and who the targeted buyers are. There is a lot of timing issues that you have to think about during start-up as well. Look at supply and demand, SaaS models, extension pricing and lastly competitive pricing. These are all factors that come into play, and although that seems extensive; pricing should be simple. Think of yourself as someone who is creating solutions for your peers and customers. Your product should be adding value to their lives and help customers to create their own success. 

Marketing 6101 Surfing the Tsunami Chapter 3

 In my career, I am planning on focusing on public health, specifically epidemiology. In this field, it is essential to look at multiple perspectives and to look further into data. You should always be challenging the perspective of the researcher and look for bias. I myself am typically an optimist. The three questions I should consider help me to dig deeper into the perspective given. I appreciated when the importance of investing time into data and preparing for change was brought up. 

I want to do a better job of becoming a realist. In every situation you should prioritize looking for bias, positive impact and negatives impacts. We are living in a world with constant change, and constant adaption to new and improved products and ways of living. This is where artificial intelligence comes into play, once again. We are seeing it take over in every industry, meaning we need to redesign standards in our workplaces and even society. With that being said, being a realist and seeing how AI is affecting our world is more important than ever. 

Marketing 6101 Ascend Your Start-Up Week 3

 As many of you have probably heard before, the road to success is lonely. Yu made a point to mention this while talking about the experiences and feelings that go into marketing a product. You never know what's coming, and you never know what hurdles you will have to go through. To set up a strong base, it is important to make, yet again, more micro-decisions. Your idea or product should set you apart, and although this might be difficult it is important to look far into decisions you are making. 

What product category are you really in?

Who will be by your side, and who will leave?

Thinking about your product category is important, you need to know if you are going into an existing category or if this is something new. If it is existing, think about problems you are solving and how your product can impact the group. To excel you should study the market, competitor landscape, trends and how your solution fits into all of this. When a new, exciting idea or product is being developed it might feel like you have a lot of people behind you. As we mentioned, things will get hard, and people will no longer support you. This is when it is important to find someone you trust and sees your vision. 

An even better idea is to find a team of individuals you trust. Yu mentioned for individuals that play a large role in success; thought leader, challenger, collaborator and operator. These individuals bring it different thoughts that could impact your success. Overall, these four individuals should empower you and help you to get through your experiences. 

Marketing 6101 Week 3- Guerrilla Marketing

 Levinson says there are sixteen secrets to success in guerrilla marketing. He says these sixteen secrets allow someone to 90 percent of the way towards success. The basis of these secrets come with sixteen important words: commitment, investment, consistency, confidence, patience, assortment, subsequence, convenience, amazement, measurement, involvement, dependence, armament, consent, content, and lastly augment. These words need to be memorized. You could say, these "secrets" should be the basics to every action and plan put into place for your business. He later goes on to explain the details of a few of these emphasized words. 

The most important word is commitment. How will anything gain success without commitment? Commitment means you are taking an idea and being serious about it. Commitment means trial and error, and in marketing this is essential. You will be surprised how often you will revise a plan based on feedback. This could take time, but with commitment that time will be well worth it. As for the other fifteen words, you should have these memorized and work to put them into practice to create a successful business.  

The Power of Tik Tok

 In the last two years, so many individuals have grown over night into figures from Tik Tok. There are people that grow overnight for things as simple as dancing. In one young man's case, he created a platform that later turned into a business by teaching other students how to succeed in school. Gohar Khan is a 22-year-old who has almost two million followers on the app. He has mastered his technique to figure out how to get more views and practiced graphic design to continue to improve. As you can see, continuing to become more successful and develop takes practice and effort. He is now making six figures through brand deals. 

Brand deals are something I hear about often on different social media apps and are honestly why I am skeptical about social media now. I can't tell when an individual is promoting something because they genuinely like it, or because of the money they are making off of promoting it. If I was an advertiser, I would look into who I'm choosing to promote my product or idea. I think it's important that they have credibility and a positive background. I saw in Khan's case; he gained a lot of credibility through his practice and schooling. He is now running his own business and is continuing to help students around the world. 

Tik Tok is one of those apps where a lot of creators simply blow up by pure luck. In that case, it's hard work and credibility that keeps them afloat and allows them to stand apart from the other million creators trying to do the same thing as you. 

References:

Taylor, A. (2022, May 9). A 22-year-old Tiktoker accepted by MIT, Yale, and Stanford is making six figures helping kids get into their Dream Colleges. Fortune. Retrieved May 14, 2022, from https://fortune.com/2022/05/05/advice-for-getting-into-dream-college-gohar-khan-tik-tok/amp/

Ascend Your Start-Up Chapter 2

 Everyone has gone through challenges. With that being said, your future depends on how you reacted to those challenges and if you used it as an opportunity to grow, adjust and learn. No one likes harsh criticism, or negative feedback, but when you are in love with what you're doing you may be blinded from the poor qualities the product or service might have. No idea is perfect. Personally, when I create an idea or service, I want it to be perfect. I think of every positive about the idea, and how to avoid any issues because I don't want to have to change. Change is important, ideas and products become successful through feedback. 

Your idea should start as a minimal viable product (MVP). This product may seem basic, but if it is enough to get the attention of an audience you will be thankful you started this way. The MVP will be able to hit the market very quickly, while minimizing costs. By coming out with a simple product, you can get insight to see if this product is hitting the audience you want, and what feedback you are getting. While testing your product you will see if you are truly making an impact on the problem you are trying to solve, and who compares to you. By answering these questions, you may be able to adjust and solve specific issues that could create a huge impact. Starting simple allows you to slowly invest in upgrades, or extra features while improving the quality of your product and not taking a huge risk. 

Guerrilla Marketing Chapter 2

Do I have to pay into my business to become successful? Are larger corporations at an advantage when it comes to marketing their brand?

The answer is no. If you have a high-quality product or service, you have the ability to do anything. Developing relationships and positive communication is one of the biggest keys to success when building your business. I think we all know how fast word spreads, especially in the online community. There are so many ways to build up a reputation, and the best way is to connect and relate with your audience. By doing this, a successful entrepreneur will focus on the small details, to truly impact their business. Being able to recognize when either a big or small opportunity arises and know how to advertise your product is another important aspect. 

Every aspect of marketing has to be well thought out and dissected. Are you able to do extensive research on problems that arise, and study how your efforts are affecting your audience? If not, you may not be ready for true success. Although that seems complicated, to get through to your audience you need to remember to simplify what you are expressing. Your audience will pay closer attention to what you are saying, and what you are providing. Being able to simplify your brand will make you stand out. 

What is innovation and why is it so important?

 Innovation is the process of altering a design, or situation to achieve success. Innovation takes the use of both quality and flexibility. These two terms allow businesses to make changes based on what is going on around them, or what their audience, product, or services needs for success in that very moment. Being able to think, learn, and adjust quickly while keeping a quality service takes a lot of practice. Being successful will take time and paying attention to the smallest details will drive success. A truly successful business has the heart of the entrepreneur behind it. 

Surfing the Tsunami Chapter 1

 After reading the first chapter of Surfing the Tsunami my eyes were opened to how technology has changed businesses, and our minds. The constant advances to technology have encouraged and allowed us to process more and more information. It has allowed us to do things more efficiently, and fast-paced. Kelsey mentioned three important mindsets that have impacted artificial intelligence. These three mindsets are adapt, adopt and adept. This creates an all-around awareness, and helps us to grow and integrate with advances we see. 

Al has changed business and has centered productivity and adaption around the growth of technology. It has improved data processing immensely and allows production to be a quicker process. This has changed the job market and has the ability to enhance work. I see it as a way to get things accomplished quicker, and to advance our workplaces and world. 

Ascend Your Start-Up Chapter 1

 Imagine the fear of offering a new product, or service on your own and taking the steps to make a change. No matter how great an idea may seem, you have to know how to handle it and the decisions you have to make for success. There is a lot you need to know about yourself, and your product to understand the journey you are on and how to avoid hindering progress. It is very possible that start-ups can fail due to multiple types of disconnects. Once you're past this phase your efforts will feel much easier thanks to prior preparation and knowing how to handle struggles. Be prepared for multiple phases of acclimation, adjustment and reevaluation. Below talks about five micro-decisions you should be prepared to answer. 

Why are you on this journey? 

What problems are you solving?

What does success look like to you?

How will you honor your brand?

How will you prepare for the climb?

These questions may seem simple to some, but really try to answer them to create a foundation. You should be proud of the brand you create and prepared to get through so many obstacles. You may need to ask yourself these questions multiple times throughout your journey, but they will help you grow and create a stronger brand. You should fall in love with this journey, and the problems that come along with growth. 

Chapter 1 Guerrilla Marketing

 Marketing has changed so much and will continue to change to evolve to its surroundings. Traditionally, marketing revolved around money and how it'll be invested to market in the future. It was especially centered around large cooperation's and changing their strategies based on sales, customer response and business in the store. It was a lot of guessing as to what they should do next to grow the company and add customers. Now, The Guerrilla Approach explains how marketing today creates success by investing in time, imagination and available information. It doesn't have to be as difficult as the traditional marketing approach. 

Guerrilla marketing teaches us the free tools we have in today's world. Marketing helps both prospects and customers grow. In the first chapter Levinson made a great point when he said, "Marketing is not about you. It's about them." This explains consumer behavior and their thoughts can help skyrocket a business. It's a science that is everchanging and revolves around people if you want success. 

Introduction

 Hi!

My name is Lexi Hassan, I am from Findlay, Ohio. I currently work for our local hospital, Blanchard Valley and work within the patient access department. I graduated from the University of Toledo in 2020 with my bachelors, in Healthcare Administration. I completed my MPH with a focus on epidemiology and health management & policy last week. I am hoping to work with a health department after graduating. I personally do not have a lot of business experience, but I am looking forward to seeing where my interests go after completing my MBA. 

In my free time I love reading, working out and hanging out with my two younger siblings. My goal is to run a half marathon in the next year, and I am trying to read at least 24 books this year. I moved back to Findlay last year with my two cats but am hoping to move to a bigger city within the next couple years. If anyone has advice on how to get more job experience, please let me know!