Reflective Paper Case

Reflective Paper

It is wonderful that my journey through marketing class has come to close, this semester when I signed up for MRKT-898 class my instructor was professor. Steven L. Welton, he is a great professor to have for marketing class and I knew that I was about to have the most challenging class in my life, because there is no lectures, no textbook, and not limited to marketing problems, so we will spend the time familiarizing ourselves with our “client” getting to know their marketing challenges and working on projects to address those challenges. We worked as “consultants” on specific marketing and business projects Lincoln Industries is analyzing and made presentation to top management of Lincoln Industries. So this became an experience in overcoming my fear of presenting and gaining a positive attitude toward marketing and research for a real clients.

To understand the agricultural equipment market and heat management issues within it, we started our projects with Lincoln Industries visit and made tour, there we looked to things we had no Idea about them, how they work, what is the industries that we going to do our projects around it, then we made field trips, in which we talked to customer (farmers), librarian, dealers, and experts people such as Nebraska Tractors Laboratory and Larson Tractor Test Center.

In project 3 we acted as LI marketing team and made face to face meeting with Tenneco Engineering and purchasing managers to present to them over view and history of LI, our capabilities in heat management problems in Agricultural Machinery, quality, and the ranges of values and opportunities for improved the DPF (Diesel Particulate Filter) unit and system for John Deere. So our objective from project 3 is that LI have market well with Tenneco in the past so we looking to have them to further fine tune and improve DPF unit for Tire 4 Diesel Engines. What I learned from project 3 that is marketing process is both science and art, it is science because it is require understanding the technical side of the problems we trying to identifying; also it is require knowing the rules and theories to follow. It’s an art because it is needs from marketers to demonstrate special skills to their targeted customers to have them feel that they are experts and they can solve their problems. So it’s important to build great creditability very quickly, also I learned from project 3 that we shouldn’t bring problems to customers and never ask them for helps, rather than bring them an opportunities and solutions for problems.

In this class I learned that marketing research is more than finding information related to problems addressed in our projects, its creation of new ideas with others; analyzing these information for rapid decision making; and made marketing recommendations to top management. I learned how large scale manufacturer such as Lincoln Industries use various marketing research tools and processes to analyze their customers’ problems and needs for decision making process. In addition, to I learned work in group can made better decision than individual by understanding our different prospective, and I learned how to write a paper for a business organization, I also develop my team participation skills through shared resources and ideas to contribute to the completion of the projects.