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The Case MBA 604 - Marketing through New Media - Fall 2006 other pages welcome | course | syllabus | bistro | reports | roundtable this page New Media Ventures, Inc. | trade shows marketing plan | marketing materials showtime evaluation

Rather than structure the course around a textbook, I'm structuring the course around a project. I've found it works better if everyone works on the same general process. Because you have access to some terrific software and to the Internet, I would like you to develop two things:

a framework for innovation online

a prototype web for the online marketing of a product or service, including a video / animation

The communication and information skills this project calls for -- retrieval, analysis, evaluation, and presentation -- are used throughout organizations. They are transferable skills. You can go from the marketing department, to production, to finance, to personnel and use the same skills and software.

A key word above is prototype. You have on your laptop some terrific rapid prototyping tools: Front Page for webs, PowerPoint for storyboards, Movie Maker for videos, Audacity for audio, Paint Shop Pro for images, even Word for brochures and other print pieces. You have cameras, scanners, printers, microphones, and other tools at your disposal.

No one expects the marketing department, especially a small one, to be an expert in all of these technical areas. However, the availability of all these tools is raising the bar. Your ability to rapidly assemble a prototype of your marketing materials reduces expenses through oral miscommunication and increases the likelihood that you'll get what you want.

Dead Mule Marketing

Clem, an old country farmer with some money problems and a genius for marketing, bought a mule from another old farmer for $100, who agreed to deliver the mule the next day.

However, the next day he drove up and said, "Sorry, but I have some bad news, Clem. The mule died."

"Well, then, just give me my money back," said Farmer Clem.

"Can't do that. I went and spent it already."

"OK, then. Just unload the mule."

"What ya gonna do with a dead mule?"

"I'm going to raffle him off."

"You can't raffle off a dead mule!"

"Sure I can," Clem said. "I just won't tell anybody he's dead."

A month later the two met up and the farmer who sold the mule asked Clem, "Whatever happened with that dead mule?"

"I raffled him off just like I said I would. I sold five hundred tickets at two dollars each and brought in $998. Minus the hundred dollars I paid you, that's $898 net profit."

"Didn't anyone complain?"

"Just the guy who won. So I gave him his two dollars back," said Clem, an old country farmer and a genius for marketing.

New Media Ventures, Inc.

MBA 604 is a continuation of MBA 600. There, you wrote a business plan and you started a marketing plan to compete in the pop music industry.

Here, you're going to finish writing the marketing plan to support that business plan. You're also going to make the media assets that you would use to market your business plan to potential investors, partners, and customers. In real life, you should be so lucky as to have an unlimited budget at this point. You'll want to use whatever $$ you have wisely, and spending it on web design, etc., does not need to be a big priority. Perhaps you would spend money on some logo options, but after that, I think you'll find that you have the judgment and skills to do much of it yourself until you can afford professional help.

The biggest problem is that you may not believe that you have the aesthetic judgment and the design and computer skills to develop effective marketing assets yourself. You're probably wrong. We will for certain have a better answer to that question on December 15.

The syllabus explains what we'll do to find the answer to that question:

The Ultimate Survival Guide To The New Music Industry (Handbook For Hell)
by Justin Goldberg
p. 344

...if you want to get paid for making music, you are going to have to start compromising immediately. It doesn't matter if you are standing on the street corner singing "The Times They Are a Changin'" for quarters -- someone's going to come along and say, "Can't you play 'Maggie's Farm'?" It depends how bad you want that quarter.

Now we have to develop the marketing plan and the prototype webs. We will pay special attention to the models, features, and techniques of Internet marketing as they fit into your plan.

Where would you use these media assets and marketing plan?

Making a presentation at a trade show either in an auditorium or at a booth ("poster") on the show floor or a pitch to venture capitalists. (All three of those links go to the same Port 80 page.)

The Marketing Plan

an alternative plan - QuickMBA's Marketing Plan Outline

You should be able to re-work much of your business plan from MBA 600 into this generalized marketing plan.

bullet-point plan, as long as needed

How does your web site fit into an integrated model, that is, one that uses off-line and traditional channels, also?

See a sample plan from a previous semester: Biotrak. It's about 2,100 words, more than plenty. It could be improved with some charts.

Marketing Materials

In support of this marketing plan, you're going to make the things that will help you tell your story. So there are really two marketing efforts:

marketing your products and services to your customers
marketing your company to investors

Looking back over your business plan from MBA 600, make a list of all the media assets implied by your plan.

What marketing assets -- things to design and make -- do you need to market your business plan to investors?
What do you need to market your products and services to customers?

Many assets will serve both purposes. What is the purpose they serve in your plan? What objectives will they help you reach? If your list is different from the table below, please let me know, especially if you have an asset on your list that's not on mine.

What are you going to make? Above, I called them media assets. We could also call them marketing deliverables. In the old world of ink on paper, they were often called marketing collateral. There are five areas where I want you to develop them:

narrated PowerPoint presentation with Macromedia Breeze - 15-day trial

computerized tools: still camera, video camera, Save Picture As ..

software tools: Paint Shop Pro, ULead's Video Studio

SWiSHzone.com

screen recorders (for how-to demos)

interesting look and feel, Sun's Project Looking Glass

The lists in the right-hand column above are meant to be suggestive, not definitive. The mindset that you need to develop includes:

sharing ideas, code, etc.

I don't see any zero-sum relationships between any two of your plans. Even the three indie labels are sufficiently differentiated from each other. Thus you have everything to gain and nothing to lose by helping each other. This secondary market, as we might call it, will succeed if you keep track via Parkside Plaza of what the other students are doing. The list of everyone's assets at the Bistro's Marketing Assets topic will help, too.

reusing ideas, code, etc.

The logo is an obvious example. You'll use and reuse and reuse it, different sizes, maybe different colors. You may have two or three different slogans or tag lines to use and reuse and reuse. You need a ten-word, fifty-word, and 500-word description of your business to use and reuse and reuse. You need space ads you can put on a variety of web sites. You need video clips you can cut up, copy, and paste into different shows for different audiences for different purposes.

models

In addition to the logos on the wall one night of MBA 600, you need to start looking differently at TV commercials. As a homework assignment (at least, that's what you'll tell your family), you should press the mute button on your remote control whenever the ads start. You'll learn a lot by just looking and not listening, too.

For example, look at how long a scene lasts. By "scene" I mean one continuous video sequence before a cut to another continuous sequence. Note that you'll see over two dozen scenes in most 30-second commercials. Note how much of the story is told visually without the sound. Note how often and when and where the corporate logo appears. Note whether and when the product appears. If you watch lots of TV commercials over the next few weeks, you'll be better prepared to do you own storyboards in a couple of weeks.

Do the same with ads on web sites. Don't look at them as a nuisance. Look at them critically. What's effective? What's not?

market research

ongoing R/D agenda for products and services

What do you need to know more about?

competitive analysis

supplier analysis

distributor analysis

market - geographic segments - size(s)

market - demographic segments - in the literature / in the industry / in-house

customer profiles - a set for each segment; enough in the set to represent all the demographic variables you hypothesize about.

survey instruments (questionnaires, focus group scenarios)

survey analysis

web traffic analysis

price elasticity

market context - products and services that are ancillary, supplementary, added-on, done with yours

learn more at the Roundtable topic on market research

print publications

brochures, catalogs, posters, billboards, t-shirts, mugs, space ads, packaging

One of the distinguishing features of print is that ink costs money. These publications will not require many words, and you'll be able to use the same ones over and over. They will require strong visuals -- both logo and design elements.

display materials for promotions and events

tables, boards, and backdrops

The same images that you use for your publications should be used for display materials. Such re-use helps integrate the brand and its message.

webs

You are going to make a FrontPage prototype or proof-of-concept model of your company's overall web presence. I see four audiences / purposes:

corporate presence (public relations - PR)
investors (plans, finances, management team) - ex: Amazon's IR web
ecommerce (transactions)
community (customer support)

These may all be separate webs with different domain names. They may be sections of a large complex site all with the same domain name.

You will also need banner ads to display on other sites to draw traffic to yours.

We are going look carefully at the options, aka trade-offs.

what online business model should your web use?
what features should it have? how do those features work?
what marketing techniques should it use?
where can you find more information about this kind of online marketing?

These four areas -- where your trade-offs will come -- cover the same territory as the questions below from Webmonkey's E-Commerce Tutorial. The phrasing fits a retail store best, but you can translate it to your business model.

Strategy

While all these pretty things you're making are wonderful and fun, they don't mean much unless they work. Making them work together is what MBA's in the marketing department get paid for.

What techniques or processes will carry your strategies to your customer?

Questions to answer about your prototype marketing web

Features
content and activities
customer service
financial, backend

Techniques
branding and partnering (co-branding)
advertising and promoting
personalizing and customizing
community building, making Web content accessible

Learn more about the technical requirements for your prototype.

video/animation

a note about software "solutions"

Many companies are happy to "solve" whatever problem you may not even know you have until they tell you about it. A new industry like Web marketing dishes up an alphabet soup: ERP, CRM, SFA, MIS, and then the thousands of specific scripts and programs that make the back end of e-commerce sites run smoothly. Many are proprietary; many are open source.

I put "solutions" in quotation marks because seventy-some percent of them are said to fail whether proprietary or open source. The causes of failure are the usual not-enough suspects: not enough info, not enough money, not enough upper management commitment let alone comprehension, not enough experience to understand the implications, etc. The solutions to the original solutions are often messy; meanwhile, we muddle on.

a note about oral presentations

As part of the process of developing your oral presentation skills, you're going to make half a dozen presentations in this course. To step it up a notch:

personal appearance

Stand straight. Don't chew gum. Look at your listeners, not just me.

visual aids

Use as little text as possible. All material (text and images) that came from a source -- online or offline -- needs to be credited. Use quotation marks or some other consistent system. Credit sources in text. Use links to provide direct access to sources where possible.

use of visual aids

Do not read more than one sentence off the screen. You must learn how to present extemporaneously. You should also expect questions that you may not have prepared for. Thinking on your feet is a job skill.

the map

This site map should make good use of size, shape, color, and position to communicate the significance and relationships of the parts of the web site. Your presentation should address the following:

strategy

How do the site's features address the objectives in the marketing plan?

This is the most important question to answer. Your answer will discuss some of the same ideas as will the presentation of the prototype web for your final presentation. There, you will talk more about the visual design. Here, you will talk about the features such as catalog, shopping cart, check-out system, etc. In the process, you should try to answer several other questions about content and usability.

content

You have a lot of information and activity on your site. How is it arranged?

What's on the site? What's not on the site?
Why are the parts arranged that way?
Explain the central metaphor or theme or organizing principle.
How scalable and extensible is the design?

usability

How does that organizing principle relate to the user (or users)?
What will the user use the site for? Present a typical scenario.
How will the user navigate? Present a typical session.

What's next?
How does the site address privacy, security, help, searching, and timeliness?

trade-offs

What does the site not do that you wanted it to and why?
What does the site do that you did not want it to and why?

Learn more about information design and about interactivity design.

the prototype

The showpiece of your project will be the prototype Web site. A prototyping tool such as FrontPage will let you develop enough pages to give a sense of the look and feel as well as a sense of the site's main functions. The web should work within the context of a marketing plan.

No one expects a completely finished and functional site in terms of features: shopping carts and various personalization techniques that cross the Geek Line into programming. Much of the prototype will also be empty. For example, the investor relations page can certainly have an area for SEC filings without your having to write any!

The prototype should have sample pages displaying the user interfaces for these features.

While the web is the showpiece, the heart of your project is a visual map of the whole site. While the graphic artists can make the web look good and the geeks can nail down the code and scripts, marketers are responsible for the design of the information and the activity. More broadly, this is known as the user experience. Put your creative energies into this aspect of the prototype.

Even more important than your prototype and map is the clarity of your analysis:

what driving and restraining forces are shaping marketing for our customers?
how have these forces affected the prototype?
how will they continue to shape the future for our customers?

Portfolio requirements

All the material for this project -- plan, site map, .htm files, image files, video files -- needs to be in a self-contained folder with your home page address: RicciStreet.net/dwares/plaza/lastname/projectname/.

It needs to be self-contained so that it can be copied to a floppy for distribution at a trade show or to another server at PrototypeName.com.

Regardless of whether you like it, this portfolio is open source. Anyone can view your source code. Since you don't know what you might end up doing with this web, I want to encourage you to do yourself a big favor and make the code as clean and sophisticated as possible. Personally, I wouldn't hire you without looking at your source code, nor do I think you'd hire someone without looking at theirs. Right?

For example, you should use separate style sheets. You will not only be able to quickly change the web's look and feel. You will also show any view-source snoopers that you weren't born yesterday.

What about templates?

No matter what your level of visual design experience and prejudice (who likes dark backgrounds?), you should type the phrase "free web design templates" (without the quotation marks) into the Google search box. Beware of templates that look like templates. You know enough HTML and FrontPage to be able to tweak any template.

Showtime!

Hey, guys, let's put on a show! If we're going to do all this work, at least we ought to get some people to pay attention to us.

The faculty expect you to be able to explain new media marketing to others in a variety of settings:

one-to-one or one-to-a-few online via videoconferencing and IM
one-to-one or one-to-a-few offline around a laptop or desktop monitor
individually and in teams to groups small enough to reach without a microphone
individually and in teams in an auditorium where you will need a microphone

In order to be effective in this change-agent role, you need an accurate mental model and accurate vocabulary. Clarity of analysis is important. It can get you hired and promoted. You need the listening skills to let you recognize others' inaccurate mental models and the ability to help them adjust. You need to be able to answer questions, especially "Why should we do this?", by making a succinct business case.

We will have a public showcase on June 8, 13, and 15, 2005. There, you will each make individual presentations in the Lecture Hall.

audience

You have two audiences to consider here, the audience for your presentation and the audience for your business, aka your customers. The following groups are typically well-represented at the trade show where you will make your presentation.

It is easy to imagine a scenario where you would be making a presentation to a group of one of these audiences, or a mix. At a trade show, you might be repeating this presentation every hour. You would start by asking your audience which of the above groups they belonged to. And then you would tailor your presentation to fit them. If there were cameras -- still or video -- you wouldn't know what shot they would use, so you have to look and sound good the whole time.

Pick an audience from the above list. Take them on a tour as though what's on the screen in the Lecture Hall is your new house and you're proud of it. Explain, in any order that makes sense and using the lists below as a guideline only:

summary

your business

your marketing plan

strategy

How do the site's features address the objectives in the marketing plan?

This is the most important question to answer.

content/structure

You have a lot of information and activity on your site. It should include all the things you made for MBA 604, including the digital files of the paper pieces. How is it all arranged?

What's on the site? What's not on the site?
Why are the parts arranged that way?
Explain the central metaphor or theme or organizing principle.
How scalable and extensible is the design?

usability

How does that organizing principle relate to the user (or users)?
What will the user use the site for? Present a typical scenario.
How will the user navigate? Present a typical session.

What's next?
How does the site address privacy, security, help, searching, and timeliness?

design

why do the media assets (pages, videos, image, etc.) have that color scheme, font, images, etc.?
why are they laid out that way?
how do the assets exemplify design principles such as speed, simplicity, and clarity?
explain your web's navigation system

technology

What technologies will take the marketing assets to full production? For example, databases, scripts, embedded media such as video or animations.

trade-offs

What couldn't you do with the project that you wanted to?
What did you have to do with the project that you didn't want to do?

This part will repeat some of the ideas from the presentation of your site map. There, you will talk more about the functions such as shopping cart, check-out system, etc. Here, you will talk about the strategy, the visual design and the psychology of the interactivity.

Evaluation

I try to engage each of you in an ongoing discussion of your learning. If you aren't getting enough feedback from me, ask for more. As you'll see, I'm big on formative feedback and Socratic questioning. I expect you to participate in both our physical classroom and our digital classroom. At a minimum, you should:

follow all the links on the syllabus, especially those on the To Do (homework) lists
contact me a dozen times via email and instant message
post at least two dozen messages at the Bistro, including your industry analysis and marketing plan
make a prototype marketing web at Parkside Plaza

Your course grade will come from doing the minimum above and from several presentations. These presentations are tightly timed. I recognize that bosses, spouses, and children have competing demands on your time. If you can't make one of your presentations, please trade with another student. It is your responsibility to work out a trade. Missing one will lower your course grade, as below, because it will be a loss to the group as a whole.

I am unsure what to do if you miss the event on Friday, June 6. It is outside the normal class time, but it is a very important part of the learning experience. In the policy statement below, I weasel out by saying your grade will be "lower" without specifying how much lower.

Except for private email and instant messages, all the work you do for this course will be publicly available. It will all be linked from the home page of your Parkside Plaza web. In addition, I will chart your oral presentations on the reports page. Because these ideas and skills build on one another, it is very important that you do the presentations you are assigned.

This is graduate school and this is a learn-by-doing course. There is no final exam or convergent skill set for you to master. "This course is all about mistakes" is a phrase I often hear in self-assessments from students who are voracious learners. The idea of mistakes makes some students very nervous. They want to know the One Right Way of doing things and they aren't into taking chances. If I were using a more traditional grading method, you could not afford to make "mistakes" because you'd have a lower grade as a result. I try to reward mistakes and my biggest enemy is your fear of being hit by a low grade. Putting it off and doing it all at the end in a mad rush will not produce the learning you will need for other courses, especially MBA 624. Thus:

If you do the minimum above in a timely manner and make the presentations, you'll get an A- for the course. That's what I expect most of you to get. Note that I don't mention how well you do them. Because your work is public, I expect that your personal pride will motivate you more than a grade. Nevertheless, I'm sure I'll get email after the course wondering why you got "only" an A-. I will reply to the email by directing you back to this web page.

If you do the work with flair and enthusiasm, you'll get an A, but that's exceptional. (None last year.) Your boss could show the web pages or presentation to a client or to the big boss as is. Your boss would remember them when discussing a promotion. It does not matter that you deserve an A+ because you worked hard and are an all-around wonderful person. I don't doubt that for a moment, but it has nothing to do with this course grade.

If you don't do the minimum above in a timely manner or one of the presentations, you'll get no better than a B+ for the course. You will certainly be letting down your team members as well as hindering your own learning. If you don't do two, we need to talk about whether you have time for the course. Note the chart of your progress, with plenty of closing dates to encourage timeliness.

Please note that a "lousy" presentation will get the same A- as one I personally "like". However, that doesn't mean I don't have standards and you don't have pride. Note the criteria below as well as my philosophy of learning and grading.

Rework Policy | The following three policies address rework, which is a big issue with process-oriented courses like this one.

1. Because of the tight progression of the reports, I don't know how and where to fit in a realistic make-up of your oral presentations. Instead, try to arrange a switch.

2. The final presentation, especially the public showcase, is most important. They can't be made up. If you miss them, your grade will be lower.

3. Your writing -- web pages and Roundtable messages -- however, can get revised as often as you want after the original due date.

In addition to these presentations, please note that you have one other very important requirement. You must email a self-assessment when you have done all the other work for the course. I will not turn in a grade for you until I get that email.

Criteria

While grades are useless at best and statistically bogus, I'm a big fan of feedback, assessment, evaluation: better now in class than later on the job and better from many sources than from one. I expect you to seek feedback from your team and your classmates as well as from me. My evaluation of written and oral work asks four questions.

content Is it logical, insightful, and visually interesting?
structure Is it easy to follow and learn from?
language Is it designed, written, illustrated, and presented in an appropriate business tone?
mechanics Is it free of error and attractive to look at?

In short, does your work exhibit a command of business communications and its conventions, especially new media's evolving conventions?

It comes down to this: If I were your boss, I would want to see documents, screens, and presentations that are attractive and accessible. Having your work available when I need it affects the quality component of my assessment. The quality of your writing can be important at raise and promotion time.

These criteria are loaded with ambiguous and subjective terms: easy, appropriate, attractive, flair, enthusiasm. Such holistic characterizations come from observations colored by assumptions and prejudices. However, there are some generally agreed upon professional standards. We will discuss them in class and at the Bistro before your first presentation.