Spending
a semester taking a marketing class at St. Michaels College has made me much
more educated on the area of marketing in the business world. In our BU113 class, we got a good introduction
to marketing by learning some of its basic concepts involved with the 4 P’s of
marketing. In this course, we were abele
to take a much closer look into marketing and the many functions it serves to
keep businesses alive and prosperous in a competitive market.
One
important marketing concept that I got out of this course was learning about
market segmentation. Market segmentation
is what companies use when they want to target multiple different markets from
different demographics or lifestyles. I
wrote about market segmentation in my blog and talked about Chevrolet and how
they have a vast variety of car models that target all different demographics
and lifestyles. Looking at market
segmentation, you see that it is everywhere and many companies use it in their
marketing strategy.
Taking
this course allowed us to dive deeper into how the 4 P’s of marketing take
effect from the price, promotion, and place side of things. From pricing, I learned about all the
different pricing strategies companies use when trying to sell their product
such as price skimming, penetration pricing, and prestige pricing. From place, I learned about how the
distribution channels work and how products get from the producer to the
consumer either through wholesalers, retailers, or agents. For promotion, I learned about the multiple
ways in which companies can promote their products such as through advertising,
sales promotion, and public relations.
In
the process of learning these concepts, we were able to apply them to our
practice marketing simulation. In our
practice marketing simulation, we were responsible for selling our own backpack
and a target market we wished to sell it to.
Throughout the simulation we had to come up with ways to promote our
product and set a price that our target market would be willing to pay. I learned a lot from this experience because
it made me better understand the concepts we were learning in class and the
situations in which they work and don’t work in the marketing world. Having us to a simulation like this and
getting the opportunities to make our own marketing decisions was definitely
beneficial in retaining the information taught to us in class.
With
being part of this marketing class came a number of presentations both with
groups and individually. During the
course of the semester we had to present a TED talk and two advertisements on
our own without any use of notes. We
also had to make group presentations with our team from the practice marketing
simulation. Having done all of these
presentations, feel that I have better learned how to prepare for a
presentation. For me, it is important to
put in extra preparation for my presentation by practicing multiple times what
I am going to say. I still feel that
making presentations is something I need to work on, however by taking this
class I definitely feel more confident talking in front of a class then I did
at the begging of the semester.
Overall
I really enjoyed taking this course and feel that it was beneficial for me
moving forward into my future in and out of St. Mikes. Being a Media Studies major and Business
minor, marketing could be a field I could pursue and work in someday, therefore
taking this course and learning all that I did was a big step for me.
