Week 8 Blog Post

College Football Programs: do our players view us as something more?

In chapter 11 of Drucker on Marketing: Lessons from the World's Most Influential Business Thinker, Drucker stated that it is the consumer who ultimately determines marketing decisions and what a business is because they are the ones who pay for the goods/services.  Is this true?  Lets look at it from the eyes of a college football coach.  What do we provide to our customers (remember, we are considering our players as our customers in this scenario, especially when they are paying $40,000+ to attend Western New England University)?  We provide a service, to mold and develop football players.  Simply, we provide the opportunity to play college football.  Some would argue that we provide the foundation for preparing athletes for the real world.  I would combat that by saying that the elements of football, such as teamwork, work ethic, honesty, integrity, and dedication, prepare athletes for life after college.  So, from the eyes of a coach, we provide the opportunity for student athletes to participate in college football.

Now, lets look at the same scenario from the eyes of the players.  Drucker stated that it is the customer that ultimately determines what a business is.  So, what do players view the opportunity to play college football?

Some may view as the coach's point of view, its an opportunity to play college football.  Others may view it as a way to stay in shape, some may view it as an opportunity to hurt people, and many view it as a means of scratching a competitive itch.  Some players view it as an opportunity to improve their social status, while others may view it as an opportunity to make their families proud.  Some players may view college football as a means to a career, either playing as a professional or coaching later on down the road.  Some may view college football as a way to keep them out of trouble, or help build a resume.  Clearly, the opportunity to play college football is more to a player than just that.  The opportunity to play college football may be a combination of those listed above, or even another reason that hasn't been touched upon.

To summarize, college football programs provide the opportunity to play college football, there's no denying that.  But they also offer other opportunities as well, and we as coaches and administrators must be aware of that.  The same holds true of any business.  While you may provide a specific product or service, your customers may view it as something more than that, which is why Drucker was correct in saying that the consumer ultimately determines marketing decisions and what a business is, since they are the ones paying for it and getting what they want out of it.

PHARMASIM

This week we were asked to look at the performance metrics available within the program, and determine which metrics should be used to evaluate team performance against each other, as part of a balanced scorecard.  Obviously, sales revenue, market share position, and profitability are metrics that cannot be denied and should ultimately be incorporated in the evaluation.  I think marketing efficiency index, return on marketing, and capacity utilization should be incorporated into the scorecard as well.  All of these metrics look at the efficiency of the company, and ultimately, we should be evaluating the return on marketing as that is the main focus of the course.  I feel as though we should be evaluated on how efficient we are in managing the different marketing areas in Pharmasim, as each team has put themselves in different scenarios up to this point, so we should see how efficient we are from this point forward in working together as a team.

Looking Elsewhere

Earlier in the week, we were asked to look at the blogs of 3 of our colleagues, none of which can be a member of our Pharmasim team.  This week I decided to look at Alexis', Abhishek's, and Kristin's blogs.

Alexis' blog is a very easy read, and she does a nice job of setting up a conversational style to it.  She does a good job addressing the issues presented in class, incorporating real life experiences, and elaborating on her thoughts and ideas.  I also really like how she touches upon Pharmasim every week and gives her insight and opinions as to what happened during a particular week and why they happened.

I really like how Abhi's blog is set up, and is very user friendly.  He does a good job at addressing all of the prompts given for the week and I like how he answers his own questions that he gave earlier in the week for the class discussions.  He touches upon a lot of different areas in his blogs, and personally I would like to see him stick to fewer ideas and elaborate more on them.

Kristin's blog is a very enjoyable read as well.  I like how she incorporates pictures and comics into her blog, as it gives it a nice change of pace and an informal feel to it.  I like how she recaps on her findings of Pharmasim and expresses her interest in hearing more about other people's findings.  She seems to be using the blogs as a way to gain insight into Pharmasim, which is a very smart technique.