BUS 348 Case # 1

Please read the following case and identify all the aspects of it that you feel are correct statements. Where you feel there is an incorrect statement, identify it and provide what you think is the correct response.

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In January 2020 the founding engineers of a new consumer technology company met to decide how to organize the company and to decide how best to market their technology products. Mr. Smith started the discussion by expressing his view that marketing or sales was the art or capability of creating innovative ways to develop and sell new technologies. They need to hire creative, innovative managers because the marketing function did not require any scientific or analytically oriented people. Just creative types to develop advertising campaigns. He also wanted to hire aggressive sales people who are revenue driven and not concerned about any long term relationships but rather, short term sales since it was a new startup company. He didnt see the need for a marketing Vice President, as suggested by Ms. Jones because marketing is only a business activity that concentrates on advertising/promotions and sales.

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Mr. Brown, as the chief operations engineer, was opposed to incorporating the technology customer service people with marketing since they were under the operations function and had nothing to do with sales or advertising. The tech research and development people would also be under operations and run by the engineers responsible for developing the new technology offerings. As he indicated to Ms. Jones, consumers are not sophisticated enough to understand the complex aspects or language of technology so keep them out of the process. We know best what technology needs to be developed.

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All three company founders were aware that planning was critical to a successful launch of a new business but Mr. Smith was concerned that if planning gets too much attention it would be a drag on the companys ability to manage the introduction of new products. Besides, even if they did a poor job of planning any mistakes after a product introduction could be addressed in the field after customers bought it. As part of their own company planning Ms. Jones was instructed to develop a Mission Statement addressing what technologies they will develop looking out ten years into the future. She also was assigned the responsibility of developing marketing objectives that would be specific, measurable and time bound.

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Mr. Brown was assigned the task of evaluating the internal and external variables that would or could impact the company launch. He decided to utilize a SWOT because it would help identify all the variables the company could control. This was a good assignment for him because he could put his own interpretation on the facts they discovered and look at them from an engineering perspective. He did recognize that the legal/regulatory issues in a tech industry would be a serious consideration but he was opposed to supporting any technology industry specific codes of conduct because it would an administrative bother and add cost to the company activity. Just obeying the laws and government regulations would be satisfactory.

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Their original plan was to stay domestic so they wouldnt have to worry about any globalization issues or foreign competition. That would come later. However, Mr. Smith did insist that they plan for future international growth strategies by developing a competitive advantage for their tech products that would have both domestic and international opportunities. Once again, he turned to Mr. Brown to develop the competitive advantage based on their technological capability.

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As engineers they were excited about being in a technology industry because, as everyone knows the American consumers were very tech knowledgeable, and this would provide the benefit of having more things to sell. By having more things to sell this would support their most important strategy which was growth.

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They concluded this phase of their meeting but scheduled another meeting in a week or so to discuss possible international expansion after they experienced market saturation in their domestic markets.