Several online stores now sell products to consumers at different prices based on the user’s information, such as geographical location—which determines your proximity to competitors and your area’s average income. Although this practice, known as Internet price discrimination, is not illegal, some would say it is unethical. Do you believe this practice is unethical? Should this practice be illegal? If you think the practice should be legal, should retailers be required to put a disclaimer on their site? Explain your reasoning.
> Describe the three levels of business planning: strategic, functional, and operational planning.
> What is a marketing plan, and how does it differ from a business plan?
> Most planning involves strategies for growth. But is growth always the right direction to pursue? Can you think of some organizations that should have contraction rather than expansion as their objective? Do you know of any organizations that have actual
> You are interested in the role that Six Sigma plays with regard to product quality. Using the Internet, research the concept of Six Sigma and find at least two case studies on companies that employ Six Sigma in their day-to-day activities. Summarize your
> Explain needs, wants, and demands. What is the role of marketing in each of these?
> When most people think of successful marketing, internal firm culture doesn’t immediately come to mind as a contributing factor. You may have learned about corporate culture in a management course. What is a corporate culture? What are some reasons a fir
> All businesses—big and small—need to plan if theywant to be profitable and sustainable. Contact one of yourfavourite local businesses and make an appointment with someone who has a hand in developing the firm’s business plan. Find out how much time the
> For new products, when is skimming pricing more appropriate, and when is penetration pricing the best strategy? When would trial pricing be an effective pricing strategy?
> Identify a large company, like Disney, that has severalSBUs. Using the BCG model, assign at least one SBU to each category in the model: star, cash cow, question mark, and dog. Include at least two pieces of data for each to justify your categorization.
> Describe the utilitarianism, rights, fairness or justice, common good, and virtue approaches to ethical decision making. What is ethical relativism?
> What are the arguments for standardization of marketing strategies in the global marketplace? What are the arguments for localization? What are some ways a firm can standardize or localize its marketing mix?
> Describe the four globalization strategies representing levels of involvement for a firm: exporting, contractual agreements, strategic alliances, and direct investment.
> What do marketers mean when they refer to technological and sociocultural environments? Why do they need to understand these environments in a global marketplace?
> What aspects of the political and legal environment influence a firm’s decision to enter a foreign market? Why are human rights issues important to firms in their decisions to enter global markets?
> What are a monopoly, an oligopoly, monopolistic competition, and pure competition?
> Develop a presentation that summarizes your efforts for each of the following phases of new product development: a. Phase 1: Idea generation: Create (in your mind) a new product item that might be of interest to college students such as yourself. Develo
> Explain the types of competition marketer’s face: discretionary income competition, product competition, and brand competition.
> Define the terms consumer goods, services, and industrial goods.
> Explain and give an example of cost-plus pricing, target costing, and yield management pricing.
> Explain how GDP, the categories of economic development, and the business cycle influence marketers’ decisions in entering global markets. What are the BRICS countries? What is the Group of Seven (G7)?
> Explain what world trade means. What is the role of the WTO and economic communities in encouraging free trade? What is the role of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in global trade? What is protectionism? Explain import quotas, embargoe
> Why is it increasingly important that firms engage in sustainability? What are some ways strategies for the Four Ps can include sustainability?
> What is ethnocentricism?
> Describe the market conditions that influence a firm’s decision to enter foreign markets.
> Ethical relativism suggests that what is ethical in one culture may not be considered ethical in another. What should the attitude of businesses be when differences occur? Should businesses follow the ethical values and practices of their own country or
> Ford Motor Company has committed to investing $1.6 billionto construct a small car plant in the San Luis Potosi State inMexico. This will result in the creation of more than 2,800 jobsin the country. The Center for Automotive Research states thatU.S. aut
> What happens when you are no longer "the Happiest Placeon Earth"? The Walt Disney Company doesn't want to findout and is "reimagining" its pricing strategy. Responding tothe ever-increasing demand for theme park tickets, especiallyat peak times, Disney h
> What is your viewpoint about measuring creativity? Do you believe it is more constructive or damaging to organizational innovation? Support your opinions.
> Do you know how many different ways there are to enjoy an almond? According toagricultural cooperative Blue DiamondGt0wers, quite a few! After a price spike for almonds earlier inthis decade, a market correction has occurred, prices have fallen,and deman
> Give an example of how the competitive environment influences prices. What about government regulation and consumer trends? What are some ways the global environment can influence a firm’s pricing strategies?
> Can virtual reality go mainstream? Facebook would like to believe the answer to that question is a resounding "yes!• The company has big plans for its virtual reality offering, the Oculus Rift, which is designed to transform how people play games, view v
> What's for dinner? Sprig would like to play a part in a health conscious customer's answer to that question. Sprig is an on demand delivery restaurant that offers balanced meals which are fully prepared and delivered in 15 to 20 minutes. The company focu
> There is always room for more. At least that's what Airbus thinks. It has improved on its A320 product family (the world's best-selling aircraft) and introduced the A320neo (new engine option). The A320neo is available with two different engine configura
> How would you like it if every time you used your medication somebody knevv about it? Novartis wants to collect information in the cloud whenever someone uses its Breezhaler inhaler. The company has entered into an agreement with Qualcomm Life. Inc. to c
> We all know that the world has gone mobile! But how does this change impact the way market research is done? According to the Pew Research Center, 30 percent of cell phone owners use their phones as their primary Internet access point. Consumers are chan
> In marketing, yesterday's success quickly becomes old news. How should one of the world's largest retailers plan to build on its' previous achievements? In the retail marketplace, it is becoming harder for companies to differentiate themselves from the c
> Some of the U.S. population supports free trade, whereas others are unhappy, even angry, that the government has reduced regulations on imports of such products as textiles and furniture, causing factories to shut down and employees to lose their jobs. T
> Explain how unethical marketers might use bait-and-switch tactics, price-fixing, and predatory pricing. What is surge pricing?
> What are trade margins? How do they relate to the pricing for a producer of goods?
> What is a good? What are the differences between tangible and intangible products?
> What is break-even analysis?
> Explain these psychological aspects of pricing: price-quality inferences, odd-even pricing, internal reference price, price lining, and prestige pricing.
> Explain variable costs, fixed costs, average variable costs, average fixed costs, and average total costs.
> Explain how the demand curves for normal products and for prestige products differ. What are demand shifts and why are they important to marketers? How do firms go about estimating demand? How can marketers estimate the elasticity of demand?
> Describe and give examples of some of the following types of pricing objectives: profit, market share, competitive effect, customer satisfaction, and image enhancement.
> What is price, and why is it important to a firm? What is digital currency, such as Bitcoin?
> Some retailers have used decoy pricing to increase the number of sales of a higher priced alternative. Describe decoy pricing. What are some products that would be good choices for decoy pricing? Is this practice ethical? Why or why not?
> Many very successful retailers use a loss leader pricing strategy, in which they advertise an item at a price below their cost and sell the item at that price to get customers into their store. They feel that these customers will continue to shop with th
> In many oligopolistic industries, firms follow a price leadership strategy, in which an accepted industry leader sets, raises, or lowers prices and the other firms follow. In what ways is this policy good and bad for the industry? In what ways is this go
> In 1999, several single European nations banded together to form the European Union and converted their individual monetary systems over to the euro. Do you believe there will ever be other economic communities that would follow this path? Explain your r
> What product factors affect the rate of adoption of innovations?
> Develop a team presentation for your class that summarizes your findings. Conclude your presentation with comments on what your team believes the company was doing that was particularly good and what was not quite so good.
> Some countries have been critical of the export of American culture via movies, television, music and many American consumer goods by U.S. businesses. What about American culture might be objectionable? Can you think of some products that U.S. marketers
> Explain the differences between undifferentiated, differentiated, concentrated, and customized marketing strategies. What is mass customization?
> List the criteria marketers use to determine whether a segment may be a good candidate for targeting.
> What are some of the ways marketers segment B2B markets?
> List and explain the major demographic characteristics frequently used in segmenting consumer markets.
> What is market segmentation, and why is it an important strategy in today’s marketplace?
> What is market fragmentation, and what are its consequences for marketers?
> Working as a team with two or three other students in your class, select an organization in your community that practices marketing. It may be a manufacturer, a service provider, a retailer, a not-for-profit organization—almost any organization will do.
> What do marketers mean by creating a brand personality? What examples can you come up with of uses of brand anthropomorphism?
> How do marketers use perceptual maps to help them develop effective positioning strategies?
> What is product positioning?
> In recent years, for packaged products the FDA has proposed that companies include the percentage daily value for added sugar on the nutrition label. The primary reasoning behind this proposal is that it would provide information on added sugars comparab
> What is behavioral segmentation?
> Explain the process of consumer psychographic segmentation.
> What is a target marketing strategy?
> A few years ago, Anheuser-Busch Inc. created a new division dedicated to marketing to Hispanics and announced it would boost its ad spending in Hispanic media by two-thirds to more than $60 million, while Miller Brewing Co. signed a $100 million, three-y
> In this chapter, you learned about the use of geotargeting and its capability to more precisely provide consumers with benefits such as promotions that are especially relevant and impactful to a particular group. Could geotargetting backfire for a compan
> You probably had more than one school in mind before you ultimately decided on the college or university you are now attending. To better understand how consumers make decisions, prepare an outline that shows how internal influences like perception, moti
> During the last week of class, your professor explains how she wants to employ a gamification strategy next semester to further motivate and engage students, and she is asking for your help. Develop a simple gamification strategy that she can use in the
> We learned in this chapter that when considering a product need, consumers have an evoked set of brands and a consideration set of brands. With some of your classmates, conduct a simple research study and explain your results using the following steps. S
> Rank the conversion actions in order of importance and include an explanation of why you have ordered them as such. Identify whether they are short-term oriented as they relate to the organization’s objectives or long term-oriented (or, in some cases, bo
> If you could choose only two marketing metrics (remember metrics, not conversions) to track for each of these websites, identify which two you would select for each website and explain why.
> Are there specific products that you purchase where branding does not matter and has never mattered to you? What characteristics of the related products and your own individual preferences can help explain why this might be the case?
> How would data be collected for each element, and how might management at JC Penney utilize that data to provide loyal customers with a very strong relationship with the firm?
> In what ways could JC Penney expect to measure the four elements of CRM above within the context of a reward program such as this?
> What is a cost-per-order? What kind of information do marketers gain from this metric?
> What is a conversion? What are some examples of conversions on an e-commerce website?
> What is a click-through rate, and how is it calculated?
> To what does the lifetime value of the customer refer, and how is it calculated?
> Define marketing metrics. How can marketing metrics help marketers understand the performance of different marketing initiatives and provide greater control?
> What is the difference between purchasing digital advertisements with a cost-per-impression structure versus a cost-per-click structure? Is one better than the other?
> What are marketing analytics, and what kinds of insights are enabled by today’s marketing analytics solutions? What are predictive analytics?
> What is the difference between structured and unstructured data? What are some examples of each?
> Find an example of a brand extension that you believe negatively impacted consumer perceptions of the brand. Explain why you believe this to be the case by citing aspects of the brand extension that you believe were most detrimental as well as specific e
> What is data mining? For marketers, what are some of the most important applications?
> Describe the various sources of Big Data for marketers.
> How would you describe Big Data? What are some of the most significant sources of competitive advantage that Big Data offers?
> Explain the concepts of share of customer, lifetime value of a customer, customer equity, and customer prioritization.
> What is CRM? How do firms practice CRM?
> A study conducted by Adobe found that 77 percent of marketers surveyed believe that data on customer purchase histories can improve marketing performance, yet only 21 percent actually use it. Similarly, 88 percent believe that behavioral data can have a
> Describe the Internet and how Web 3.0 and 4.0 provide greater opportunities for marketers to interact with their customers.
> Imagine that you are building your own e-commerce site. Having a keen understanding of the importance of defining and putting in place a set of conversions and metrics in advance of launching the site, you have incorporated the definitions and developmen
> For this assignment you are going to act as a manual version of a software program that conducts sentiment analysis. Select a sample of comments (between three and five that do not contain any explicit words or expressions) created by users in response t
> As an admissions manager for a college or university, you are interested in exploring the use of predictive analytics within the admissions process to bring in students with a higher likelihood of graduating from the school and achieving greater levels o
> As an entrepreneur, you know you want to open a new grocery store, but you aren’t sure what kind of products you want to carry. Discuss the importance of national brands, store brands, and generic brands. Which brand or brands will your new story carry?
> When we consider data quality, what are the differences among validity, reliability, and representativeness? How can you know the data have high levels of these characteristics?
> What important issues must researchers consider when they plan to collect data online?
> What is a (computer) cookie? What ethical and privacy issues relate to cookies?
