Chapter 4 - Focus Group

Market research is the primary topic of chapter 4. Market research refers to the general process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting information about customers, competitors, and the business environment in order to improve marketing effectiveness. One market research tactic involves the use of focus groups. After a marketing team has narrowed down the public to the target market for their product/service, some researchers choose to take their actions a step further using focus groups. A Focus group is a group of similar consumers in the same target market that is paid to meet and discuss a vendor's product or service. The discussion is centered around the 4P's and consumer perceptions, evaluations and opinions of a product or service. Focus groups are an important part of market research in a sense that they provide first-hand reactions and opinions toward a product or service and, afterward, marketing teams can edit/reevaluate their product or service so that it is specifically tailored to their target market and their assumed reactions.

Chapter 2 - Mission Statement

In chapter 2, Featherman addresses what factors make up a marketing plan and explains how different marketing plans can be used in reaching specific marketing goals depending on the desired outcome. However, all marketing plans boil down to a company's mission statement, a clearly defined, straightforward plan of what the company hopes to achieve in its future endeavors. Professor Featherman defines a mission statement as "a formal paragraph in an organization's strategic plan that describes the overall purpose of the organization and what it intends to achieve in terms of its customers, products, and resources." Above is an example of what a mission statement should look like, both structurally and visibly. Mission statements not only provide a general guideline for the company to follow, they also serve as brief descripions of an organization and their intentions, a notion that could be researched by both competitors and investors alike.

Chapter 1 - Brands

In chapter 1, Professor Featherman briefs the reader on a few marketing basics before dividing into the rest of course. One of these basic topics included branding an the benefits of having a clear, recognizable brand. Featherman defines a brand as "a name, term, symbol that identifies one company's product(s) and sets it apart from their competition. The thing that turns a commodity into a specialty, and allows you to charge triple what the product is worth and 10x what it costs to make." In this picture, there are several popular brands that, no doubt, could be easily dechipered and linked to the companies they represent. Nike, McDonalds, Mercedes and Microsoft Windows have proved to have easily recognizable brands and its hard not to associate them with their corresponding companies, who (given their past success) can simply post their brand name and successfully market themselves without much effort.