Blog 8 - Project Reflection - Due 4-Dec

Here is your final blog assignment. 

For this one, I'd like you to spend some time reflecting on the design-thinking group project that you have been working on all semester. This blog is fairly structured, so please read and consider this one before completing your blog entry. This is your last one, so enjoy it! (oh, remember that you only need to complete 6 out of the 8 total)

First Paragraph

Pick one main idea, core concept, topic, or skill (or a combined set of any of those) from this course that you believe you understand better as a result of working on this group project. Describe what it is and give a specific example of how the project helped you gain a better understanding of it.

Second Paragraph

Pick another main idea, core concept, topic, or skill (or a combined set of any of those) from this course that you believe you understand better as a result of working on this group project. As above, describe what it is and give a specific example of how the project helped you gain a better understanding of it.

Third Paragraph

What part of the project was not useful or do you feel like was not of value in working on this group project. As above, describe as best you can and provide specific examples.

Fourth Paragraph

Lastly, describe the emotional reactions you had along the way as you worked on this project. Reflect on the experiences you had with your teammates, the instructor (me), and the process of the project. Do you feel like working with your group contributed to your learning and/or enjoyment of this material? Explain why or why not.

Blog 7 - Ethics of Insights - Due 11-Nov

For this one, I'd like for you to think seriously about the ethics of what we do in marketing to gain insights about people that we then hope to use to influence them to buy/use our products and services (or buy/use them more often).  Living in a world of big data and creating opportunities to capture key insights in more qualitative approaches, we are always attempting to pull in more and more data about people and more and more of that data is becoming more personal and, often, more sensitive in nature.

So, is there or should there be some limit to all of our efforts or is all of this just fair game in the pursuit of a free and more effective marketplace, placing the burden of responsibility on the people who end up providing their information through one means or another (either answer surveys, using social platforms, shopping in our stores or online, etc)?

There are several articles assigned for you to read on this topic and there have certainly been numerous other recent articles on the topic (especially around big data and social media). 

For this blog, please pay attention (again) to the guidelines in the syllabus and at the top right of this class blog page.  I'd like to see your ability to present, discuss, and, support/refute various perspectives on this topic, while also writing about your own experiences as a person in the marketplace and incorporating the articles mentioned previously (either those I have assigned or others you have read).  There should be plenty of material here for you to write quite a bit. 

Have fun with it, although think seriously about this topic.

Blog 6 - Thoughts on Creativity - Due 25-Oct

First, please note that I have moved the due date back to end-of-day on Friday, October 25th.  I hope that helps your week a bit.  Having move the deadline for the blog, I would still really appreciate you all completing the assigned articles for Wednesday.

There have been a number of assertions and many pages of research about creativity and there still seems to be a good bit of debate about what makes people and organizations more creative (and, then, assumedly, more innovative)

The response for this is a bit more open than the previous blog topics.  Overall, I want to hear your thoughts about creativity and innovation as an individual and within organizations.  Here are some questions you can consider, but you can address other issues related to this topic if you have other things to say on this.

1.  What are you personal experiences with individual creativity?  Have you had times when you felt especially creative or, even, especially uncreative?

2.  What are your personal experiences with organizational creativity?  Have you worked at companies that felt or behaved in ways that made them more creative or, even, especially uncreative?

3.  Do you think you, as an individual, are even capable of being creative by yourself?  And, better yet, do you think a group within an organization is capable of being creative?  

4.  What do you think about the idea of different creative types of problems and, thus, different creative processes?  Should we trust ourselves just to know or sense when we need one type of approach versus another?

As always, please keep the blog guidelines in mind, which are posted in top right column of the page.

Blog 5 - Visualizing Iinsights - Due 21-Oct

For this next blog, I'd like you to get some experiences thinking about and even trying to build a visualization of data.  You may want to look at the slides I've posted on Blackboard for our session next Monday for inspiration and a wide range of visualization ideas.  Warning: the file sizes are really big (https://courses.utexas.edu, so be prepared when downloading.

The first step of this blog is to find a source of quantitative data.  You can choose a data source yourself or use one of my suggestions below from Mintel (I've posted the report summaries that you can use on Blackboard under Course Documents/Blog Stuff).  I've tried to find a few reports that seemed interesting to me.  The data source you use should be fairly simple for this first exercise, so do not choose one that is overly complicated (or choose just a piece of that data).
 
This one will not be graded based on word length, but, rather, the effort and creativity of your visualization approach.  What you produce does not need to be pretty - I'm not assuming you know how to use Adobe Illustrator or similar package, so you are welcome to draw it out very simply or do a basic representation in Powerpoint or something similar.  So, I'll be looking at how much data you attempt to represent and your effort to push yourself to visualize in a way that tells an interesting story.  Be bold and experimental with this - I promise to reward you for your audacity.

Report Topics from Mintel
Dollar & Discount Retailing Customers
Food Trucks
Fragrances
Marketing to Non-Traditional Parents
Red Meat
Retailer Loyalty Programs
Teen & Tween Beauty and Personal Care Consumer

Blog 4 - Business Model Analysis Report - Due 9-Oct

This blog is an opportunity for you to explore your report topic. This is not a final contract on your topic - you can certainly change your topic after you write this. The whole point of this blog is to explore the company enough so that you and I feel comfortable about your ability to create a full report out of it. Here is what I would like to see included:

- The company you would like to choose for the business model analysis.  Give me a brief description of the company, including the industry category, the products or services they sell, and their overall positioning in the marketplace.

- Why is this company interesting to you?  Remember: this is a big goal for the assignment!  I want to see that you have a strong interest, and maybe even passion, about this company. 

- Who are the 3 to 4 primary customer segments that are most important or that you are most interested in analyzing in this report?  I am worried that if it is less than 3, then you may have a difficult time covering them in this paper, but more than 4 and the paper will be too big.  If you only know of 2 and are still very interested, let's just discuss that one-on-one.

- Briefly, what do you think is the value proposition for each of those segments?  Is it the same across all of them or different and, if so, how?

- Please be sure to cite any sources that you use here.

Do not forget the minimum length guidelines. Also, try NOT to write in sentence fragments, although a list that includes complete sentences if fine.  As always, provide visuals where helpful.

We will be reading these posts so that we can provide feedback on what you have thus far and make sure you are heading in a good direction.

Have fun with it!

Blog 3 - Generative Research - Due 25-Sep-2013

For this one, I'd like you to get some experience with a few of tasks that we'll review in class as examples of generative research.  Blogger will only allow me to upload images, so I am going to add these tasks as a PowerPoint file to Blackboard under Course Documents/Blog Materials.  It is probably best if you print these out and use a Sharpie-type marker to complete them.  If you can, please save whatever you do as an image file (i.e., take a picture) and upload it to your blog.  If you need to bring a physical copy, please speak with me or Ryan about that.  The writing length guidelines for this one will not be as strictly applied - we will be judging effort based on the instructions provided below.


1.  Close to You
There are 2 concentric circles on the page.  First, identify the "stuff" you can not live without (5-6 items should be good).  This "stuff" can truly be anything that comes to mind.  If you can, take a photograph of the item or, if a photograph isn't possible, then feel free to capture an image from the web, draw a representation of it, or, as a last resort, just type it/write it down on the page.  Place of these artifacts in the inner circle, closest to the icon of a person. 
In the outer circle, identify the stuff (again, 5 or 6 items) that you care about but may not rise to the level of "can't live without" and do the same thing (photograph, image, drawing, or type/write). 
In addition to what you placed in the circles, please give a very brief description of the item, if it's not obvious, and provide a VERY brief reason for why you either can't live without it or care about it so much.  You do not have to do this for every item, just the 2 or 3 in each circle that you want to tell us more about.

2.  Digital Ecosystem
For this exercise, we would like to understand your digital or online world, especially in terms of how you receive news, information, updates, and other content.  Please indicate which of these digital and online sources you commonly use to get news, information, updates, or other content by drawing a line from the appropriate circle to the image of the person in the center. 
Next, if there are any sources that you use a lot more frequently than the others, please draw a second line from the appropriate circle to the image of the person in the center.
If you use something that you believe does not fit well in the categories provided, describe what that is and how you use it in one of the corners of the document. 
Finally, for the 2 or 3 you use most often, please explain for what, how, and/or why you use that source.

3.  Typical Weekday
Using the timeline towards the bottom half of the page, divide up your day from when you wake up until you go to sleep.  Please draw small lines intersecting this timeline at points where you transition from one part of your day to the next and please write some very brief description of that part of the day just above or right on the timeline.
Next, browse through the categories of information/content that we have provided in the top half of the page and, for the information that you might receive or access during a typical weekday, draw a line from that category box to the appropriate place on the timeline for when you receive or access it.  If it makes it more visually clear which content you are drawing from, then circle or highlight the box - if it does not help, don't worry about doing that.
Finally, look across your timeline and see if there are any parts of you day during which you seem to access a bit more information categories and, just below the timeline for that part of the day, provide a brief description of what is going on that time of day and why you are more likely to access this information then.  If there is anything else about your timeline and information accessed that you would like to describe, also provide that just below the timeline in the most appropriate place.

Blog 2 - Journey Mapping - Due 16-Sep-2013

For this next blog, I'd like you to explore the Journey Mapping tool.  Journey Maps allow us to understand what happens to people as they navigate a particular context in which we are particularly interested.  It is an important research and evaluation tool in our process, but we are going to explore it here as a method to greater empathy through understanding a person's set of experiences.

For this one, you'll need to interview someone about their experience, as described below.  Be sure to describe who this person is, including their current major and other relevant information about them that will help us know this person a bit better.  As always, feel free to disguise the identity (except for their current major), given this is a public blog.

The context you'll be exploring is the journey to choosing a major.  In your interviews, the starting point will be when your participant first started thinking about college majors.  As you ask them about their milestones, be sure to capture the following factors:

- what was the primary influencer, being sure to categorize whether it was a person, experience, or something else

- what major(s) were they considering as their primary focus and secondary focus

- how confident we're they feeling about this major at that time (100% confident, very confident, somewhat confident, not at all confident)

- anything else relevant to them at that point in time

You can certainly leave it open for your participant to identify the milestones, but you should be ready to prompt them with at least the following points on their timeline:

- when they first thought about a college major

- each time they changed their focus prior to entering college

- first entering college

- at least at the start of each semester to where they are now

- &/or other times they changed their focus during a semester

Feel free to use the attached template (coming soon) for your field notes, since it contains the prompts described above.  The PDF is here and the Word doc is on Blackboard. 

You will use the information you capture to build a visual representation of the journey map. An example of one is provided for you (coming soon).

Blog 1 - Empathy Map - Due: 11-Sep-2013

Well, here it is... your first blog topic! Think about the kind of information that a marketer would need to create a detailed and rich persona of someone you know fairly well, but who does not fit within your segmentation profile (skeleton).  The goal is to play with a tool that is intended to help you begin to gain empathy for someone who has a background and/or experiences that are different from yours.  With that in mind, choose someone who is more than 5 years younger or older, not your gender, and is not in the MBA or MPA program (or just finished or about to enter).  Beyond that, I'll let you figure out if the person is dissimilar enough from you to benefit from the exercise (so there is no need to clear your choice with me or Ryan).

Keep in mind that this is public blog and that it is probably best not to use real names, so consider using an alias for the person. I'd be curious to know your relationship with this person, but if you have any concerns that they might read this and be upset, you can certainly choose not to tell me that.

With that in mind, create a persona for this person in a way that would be very valuable for marketers. Remember, what we are looking for here are detailed and nuanced descriptions about them that would lead a marketer to discover or identify key insights.  Of course, what you provide may just be the first nugget and the researcher might have to dig deeper to uncover the real insight, but the information you provide should be a great start.

To give you structure, I would like you to use the Empathy Map in the creation of your persona (which is on our class slides, the Business Model Generation book, and I also describe it below without the visual canvas).  I will also encourage you to use this in your project. The Empathy Map has 6 sections (numbered) and sub questions (bulleted) for you to consider:

1. What does he or she think and feel?
-- what really counts?
-- major preoccupations?
-- worries & aspirations?

2. What does he or she see?
-- environment?
-- friends?
-- what the market offers?

3. What does he or she say and do?
-- attitude in public?
-- appearance?
-- behavior towards others?

4. What does he or she hear?
-- what friends say?
-- what bosses say?
-- what influencers say?

5. What are his or her pain points?
-- Fears?
-- Frustrations?
-- Obstacles?

6. What does he or she hope to gain?
-- Wants/needs?
-- Measures of success?
-- Obstacles?



In addition to what you write, try to be as visual as possible with this.  Consider including 2-4 images for each of the 6 sections of the Empathy Map - these can be photos you have, images from the web, or drawings/sketches you create (remember, artistic ability is not important here).

Please remember the length requirements for blogs as well as the grading criteria (all of which are available in the syllabus and on this class blog home page). Have fun with it!