Week 7 Reading Reflection

What stood out to me in the reading was that companies and the marketing industry in general is always struggling to find the best way to segment their customers.  I had assumed that marketing strategies had been perfected, when it came to measuring the customer base.  After reading this article, I learned that marketing strategies are always a mystery for companies, as well as marketing segmentation. In this article, the attitudinal type of segmentation confused me the most. Financial sophistication, time spent on investments, and risk tolerance seemed difficult to measure and the results seemed a little unhelpful.  The majority of people spend zero time on investments, so how would you compare this whole group of people? I was also confused as to why effective segmentations only have one or two issues, and why they need to be redrawn after they lose their relevance.  I would ask the author, how do the issues lose their relevance? How do brands measure random acts of purchasing? Do they believe there is a method and reason to all customer purchases?  Do they account for randomness in their calculations and analysis? Overall, I agree with the author that there is no perfect marketing segmentation, as society changes, peoples preferences for purchasing will change.  Societies values can change from spending money on physical items to spending money on experiences such as music festivals and traveling.  I do not think the author was wrong about anything in this article.

Free Money

For this assignment, I went to the outdoor area between library west and Heavener Hall. I approached people who looked like they were busy walking somewhere, just as the assignment requested. I expected all 5 people to take my dollar, because who doesn't want another dollar? When the conversation started I just stopped people and kindly asked them if they wanted my dollar.  When they asked why, I just said various reasons such as "because its a nice day" or "because who couldn't use another dollar." I got an overwhelmingly positive response: 4 out of the 5 people I asked kindly took the dollar and walked on.  One guy, however, did not want the dollar, and walked away quickly. I went with a friend, who is also in ENT3003, to do the assignment, and I was surprised when so many people she asked did not want the dollar.  So in my opinion, giving away the dollar was a lot harder than I imagined, because I never imagined people saying no.  I did not make any assumptions about the people I went up to before I went up to them, I just went up to people abruptly and at random.

Elevator Pitch No. 2

From my feedback, I concluded that people were a little confused with my pitch.  I think on my first pitch, I focused too much on the fact that the tracker was identical to a credit card.  Some people I interviewed about the product thought the tracker was only a replica for a credit card so a thief would try using that card instead of a real card.  I got the response, "Well, what if the thief tries all the cards?"  Now I tried to make my Elevator Pitch clear that the tracker is only for tracking purposes, not to stop the thief from spending any of the money in your wallet.  I also included the fact that a lot of people are now making purchases on their cell phones, so less people are carrying wallets.  Because of this, if you are carrying a wallet, it is more likely to be stolen, because the decrease in the amount of wallets for thieves to steal.  My third change to my product and pitch was the addition of an app or website, where people can access information about the whereabouts of their wallets.  Some of the people I interviewed seemed confused as to where they could track it from.  Overall, the two comments I received on my first elevator pitch were very positive, and people seemed excited about the idea.