Blog Post 8 - Reflection

Over the course of the semester, I have learned a lot in my marketing class taught by Professor Nelson. Throughout the course, I learned about the ways marketing affects our decisions to buy products every day and they amount of research and thought that is put into marketing, which I had never really thought about before. After reading Buyology, I quickly learned how much marketing was affecting my everyday life. It taught me how much time companies take to research and learn about the consumer in order to target their marketing towards them. It’s important for the employees at each company to know their consumer as well because it gives them a better understanding of what their function is within the market.

Understanding marketing is a long-term task. While we can cover a large majority of the material in class, we won’t fully understand it until we put it into practice like we did throughout the course of the semester. With the simulation, we were able to select a target market and work on advertising and customizing our product to their specific needs and wants which helped us grow our company more. It was interesting to look at the turn-by-turn decisions and how they affected our financial status and figure out how these decisions hurt or helped our strategy. It was also helpful to put this information into presentation and report format which allowed us to get practice with the formality of the business world.

One of the best ways to learn and achieve is to set goals. We did this as a team with our simulation groups through setting goals about the outcomes we wanted out of our projects. We had to write up a memo about the goals we wanted to achieve and worked towards these with each decision we made by analyzing our current standing and tweaking our strategy slightly in order to achieve our goals. In order to engage in our class, one of the best things to do was to bring in marketing news. I loved this because of how easy it was to find this information. We were able to discuss it and relate it to what we were learning in class.

Overall, I was able to learn a lot about myself as well as marketing throughout this semester. Learning about the ethical issues marketing managers’ face with how sex sells as well as the general marketing concepts helped me grasp how important marketing is to the business world.