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Introduction

Suggestions of past Brandmaps companies Memorandum There are number of recommendations that our group suggests for the new management within the areas of marketing research, sales forecasting, and new product development. Marketing Research Strategies There are over 50 marketing research studies that were made available for our team to utilize. For the first three quarters many of the research studies were ordered, however it was discovered early on that not all the studies were useful to us. The research studies that our firm found most useful were ordered on a permanent basis which ended up saving us valuable time. Such permanent studies included customer brand awareness, brand satisfaction ratings, operating statistics reports, brand quality ratings, balance sheets of the other competitive firms, the amount of market shares we have in the industry, our overall performance report along with preference testing.. Besides the permanent studies, there are three important research studies in which our team had to make specific decisions on every time. These decisions included the conjoint analysis and both advertising and promotion experiments. The importance of the conjoint analysis and can not be emphasized enough. Having an understanding of how conjoint analysis can be useful for successful product reformulation. Further explanation of conjoint analysis is explained in the new product development section of this memorandum. Another research study we had to do individually is the advertising experiment. Whenever we introduced a new product, we had to make decision on the amount of money we needed to spend on advertising, as well as determine the best media content and mix in order to receive the highest % of customer awareness. We also tried varieties of media content and mix in the experiments. For example, in Canada, a combination of price, product uses, together with heavy weighs on radio, newspaper and magazines yielded a very high percentage of customer awareness (around 85%). Conducting advertising experiments is an inexpensive task, which can result in grand results. ...read more.

Middle

will provide a customer's preference. Then, Research Study #10 and #34, Conjoint analysis will allow you to narrow the range down for each product in each of the areas - product attribute mix, warranty, compatibility and price - for each desired region. Once a product is initially designed, it would be a good idea to utilize spreadsheets once again to test it against existing brands to check for violations. Here is an additional spreadsheet that will help you to test product design, it is based on accumulating data from Research Study #33 and/or Research Study #2 plus Research Study #40 (See Appendix B). (Note: you do not have to order all these studies each time, just enough to make the tables complete. A minimum of Study #33 is required to complete the table). Capacity planning is one of the most important aspects of decision making. We have seen numerous other firms that had major capacity problems due to their lack of proper inventory planning. Capacity planning is accomplished by clearly understanding the fixed depreciation and variable depreciation after production each quarter. Variable depreciation is the focus that must not be ignored. Variable depreciation is directly linked to plan usage. By being aware of the units you are producing and the ratio they generate when applied against capacity, this will demonstrate what levels your plant is running at. If it is greater than 100%, this could lead to excess expenses, you may want to use emergency production to deter this, but emergency production is expensive too. In essence, it is important to order at least the total depreciation (fixed plus variable) to maintain your plan capacity from one quarter to the next and reduce excess expenditures. There are also several key points to mention with regards to how you organize and manage your company. First of all, it is very time-efficient to get one person to manage each region. ...read more.

Conclusion

Understand the market and the competitors and your decisions will reflect your understanding. Most importantly, the marketing research studies are extremely effective if you can understand them and know how to use them! If you are not completely sure about how to use them (which was our mistake, but we needed time to learn) then devote as much time as you can to learn them early on in the game. CJM corp. Memo To: Professor Peter Popkowski From: CJM corp. Re: Recommendations Managing a company requires a lot of time, work, planning and patience. Moreover, as we have experienced, taking over where someone has left off is not at all easy. In fact, you may go through many hours of preparations just to make decisions that can either have a positive or negative outcome. To help you get started, below is a list of recommendations on how to go about making your decisions with regards to new product development, marketing research, advertising and promotions, and pricing strategies. Because new product development is not an easy task, some things should be taken into consideration. For instance, you should carefully select the region in which you wish to enter. You should take into account population growth, industry growth, taxes to be paid, check to see if you have enough capacity to handle the demand should your product do well, see what products are currently in that region and determine whether you have a good chance of capturing a significant market share. You should also determine what that particular region wants, see how much it would cost to produce that product, and find out whether or not it would be profitable to enter that region. After you have carefully selected the region (or regions) in which you wish to enter, you will also need to determine how to select a product that best suits the region(s) you are entering. The most important step is to make sure you order enough research that will help you develop a product. ...read more.

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