Reflection: Week 5

Tuesday: 

During Tuesday's lecture, we took a closer look at market segmentation.

Segmentation is marketing's version of stereotyping. Generally, the term "stereotyping" has a negative connotation because it involves judging a group of people based on superficial qualities. Market segmentation, however, is a stereotyping system that has been developed overtime and with the held of extensive research. The six broad categories that market analysts can use to segment a market are:
(1) Demographics
(2) Age
(3) Monetary Income
(4) Stage in Family Life Cycle
(5) Geographics
(6) Psychographic

Psychographic is a new term that was introduced in Chapter 8 of the text and briefly discussed in class:

Psychographic segmentation is segmenting markets on the basis of personality, motives, lifestyles, and geodemographics. It encompasses personality, attitude, motives, and lifestyle.

How can the concept of segmentation be applied to the Affordable Care Act?

There are two main factors that contribute to segmentation in the application of the Affordable Care Act: (1) participation in the program is dependent on your income level. Most young professionals have low income. (2)  Although most young professionals do not make a lot of money, they are generally the healthiest segment of the population, thus they might be willing to take the risk of living without healthcare. These two factors are only a few of the reasons why the Affordable Care Act did not work as intended. Ultimately, younger Americans were not contributing to the health care system and the elder segment of the population-who needs the most medical attention-was hurting from that.

Segmentation as it applies to your SMART Project: 

In order to make a successful product, you need to consider the benefits the product provides. If you only focus on the components of the product, you will miss out on an entire portion of "the big picture". Our challenge is to meet the needs of our target market, which goes back to a concept learned in Chapter 1- understand your customer!

 Phone Soap Assignment:

At the end of Tuesday's class we were put into groups and asked to watch a Shark Tank video about a product named Phone Soap. Phone Soap is a device that simultaneously charges and cleans your cellphone. The device is universal and will charge any brand of cellphone. Two Sharks saw potential for this product, but each saw the product in a different type of market.

One Shark saw Phone Soap as a business product that could easily be marketed to hospitals, doctor offices, and other healthcare providers. This Shark also thought that Phone Soap could be evolved to fit a tablet and clean the phone in under one minute. Another Shark saw the potential for this product to grow in the consumer market and sell wildly through infomercials and QVC.

Important Concepts from Chapters 7 & 9 that helped me analyze the Phone Soap Video:

Demand for a business product can be categorized in four ways:
(1) Derived Demand: the demand for a business product is called derived demand because organizations buy products to be used in producing their customers' products.
(2) Inelastic Demand: inelastic demand means that an increase or decrease in the price of the product will not significantly affect demand for the product.
(3) Joint Demand: joint demand occurs when two or more items are used together in a final product.
(4) Fluctuating Demand: the demand for business products-particularly new plants and equipment- tends to be less stable than the demand for consumer products.

Many different types of business products exist. The following are what category I believe Phone Soap could be classified as:
(1) Accessory Equipment: accessory equipment is generally less expensive and shorter-lived than major equipment. Phone Soap can be considered this type of business product because acquiring it would be an expense to the company and the product would not be associates with depreciation over time.
(2) Supply: Supplies have relatively short lives and are inexpensive compared to other business goods. I feel this group of business products is a great classification for Phone Soap because it is a product that would aid a businesses operations, not one that would directly impact them.

Thursday: 

Thursday's class was a joint class between the business and engineer students. The class was centered around presenting your team's top three product designs and logo ideas and receiving feedback from other groups. I feel that our group received a lot of valuable feedback as to how we can further improve our product:

The most drastic change we will be making to our product is making the temperature settings of the wheel cover both warm and cool. We feel that making this major addition to our project will expand our market and increase the overall attractiveness of the product. We are going to be looking into using a thermodynamic heat source to power the steering wheel.

Our team will be meeting over the weekend to revise the team memo and come up with a final product design.