OK, so I checked out BusinessWeek's slides on the top non-US business schools, knowing very well that Queen's School of Business had grabbed the first place for the third time in a row (2004, 2006 and 2008). My surprise was to see the banner on the top of the page:

Mannheim is investing quite a lot in marketing. We have seen them on Facebook, I have seen them on the schedule leaflets on the ICE trains to Mannheim and now, BW.
I guess that all is good, after all, the better the Mannheim name is known in the business world, more valuable my Mannheim MBA degree gets.

It is impressive how it is now easily possible to create billboard with location specific data. It makes targeting much, much more effective. But it increases the probabilities of mistakes. You don't have to aprove one design for a whole regions, but dozens, hundreds or even thousands. In this example, the ad directs you to places where you can get the catalog near the billboard. Note that the word "Straße" is mispelled.

So this is what I found while surfing my colleague's Facebook pages for productive, thesis related purposes.
I would be really interested to learn how Facebook advertising is performing for Mannheim Business School. In Canada we had a presentation of the founder of www.redflagdeals.ca who said that his results with Facebook had been very disappointing.

I am eating something similar to a Soupy Snax, so I decided to publish this text I wrote as an MBA assignment. It is one case were I can combine the themes MBA and harmonica safely.

I had previously seen the Soupy Snax 4:00 example somewhere, but it is a very good instance where the purpose of the product is so well communicated to the client.
In yet another example of the harmonica industry, Hohner has secured for them the best name a diatonic harmonica could ever have: "The Blues Harp".
Harmonicas are divided in mainly 3 groups: traditional instruments, chromatic instruments and, the most popular, the ten hole diatonic harmonicas. The latter are the more affordable models and are the only ones whose notes can be soulfully bent, giving it the characteristic wailing sound so intrinsic to harmonica blues playing.
But these instruments are not known as ten hole diatonic harmonicas, but under the nick name "blues harp". So, by registering this name decades ago, Hohner has made sure that, when an aspiring musician comes to a music dealer and asks for a harmonica to play the blues, he or she will probably ask using the most common name in English (and several other languages, additionally): "I want to buy a blues harp". The consumer is not aware that he is using a specific model name, but he has narrowed the choice of the dealer to this Hohner product. If he or she asks for a blues harp and gets a Hohner Blues Harp, he or she will be reassured to be buying the correct item. If the dealer offers a Suzuki Folk Master, which is a very similar instrument, the customer might become confused.
Just as a side note, the most traditional blues harmonica is The Hohner Marine Band, which, for a harmonica, is an awful name, as it doesn't convey any meaningful message to today's population (the Marine Band was a popular American Navy brass band in the late 19th century).
Hohner has tried to name their chromatic harmonica in a meaningful way. A chromatic harmonica is a harmonica which, differently from the other two categories* of instruments, can play a full chromatic scale. It was probably the most significant invention in 200 years of harmonica history. The name the Germans out of Trossingen came up with was "The Chromonica", which should convey the differentiating quality of this instrument. They had success in that, as it is easy for a buyer to figure out that he or she is doing the correct purchase when looking for a chromatic instrument. But Hohner's hopes of establishing the name Chromonica as a synonym for chromatic harmonicas didn't really work out that well. Some older generation Germans will use it in that way, but most of the harmonica community uses the term "chromatic harmonica" instead.
During my stay there, we launched the "7 Blues Harmonica Starter Set", which is a set with 7 inexpensive and low quality harmonicas, for a very affordable price. We tried to manage consumers' expectations by including the "starter" word in the name and by mentioning in the package that this was the ideal product for starters wanting to experiment with different keys or tonalities. Furthermore, we refrained to use the expression "blues harp" to differentiate this product from the actual "blues harp" model.

*Okay, not really. Richter style harmonicas and even tremolo harmonicas can be played chromatically with the use of advanced techniques.

The simulation wasn't as nerve wrecking as I expected it to be. I guess this was because of the very well balanced team I ended up in. And a very beautiful team, as I am sure you all will agree.

The good news is that our group made the most profits selling American tooth paste in Latin America and we won the competition, getting a bottle of Chilean wine as prize. And good marks too, I hope! We didn't have the most sales, but, in the end, the money that ends up in the stockholders' pockets is what counts, right?

Some tips for future participants:

• Be clear where you want to start, how and why.
• Develop a good idea which countries to enter in the next rounds to have a general strategic direction.
• Don't compete on price. Invest in advertisement and promotion, keep an eye on the margin.
• Take a closer look at wholesalers and deploy fewer sales people to traditional retail.
• Go for big markets. Early on.
• Keep number of markets and SKUs low, to make situation review and decision input stay in a manageable time frame. Keep comlexity low.
• Make notes for your final report during the simulation.
• No real need for laptops. One extra computer per team is more than enough.
• Use benchmarks. Compare with the competition.
• Don't build up too much capacity at first.
  

A conservative approach worked for us. But I am curious what would happened if we had gone to all markets at the same time. Or entered one market with all SKUs. Or tried only the web shopping channel.

Thanks, team "Operación latina"!

This is going to be a short post. But suffice it to say that I have had another enjoyable week at MBS. It was not an easy week and I am writing although I should be sleeping to prepare for the International Marketing Strategy Simulation tomorrow, but the course has been really good, again. I am happy with my choices, so far.
It is a very high content course, building nicely on the material of Cross-Cultural Management and International Management. We used concepts from both courses often. But I am glad that the lectures' part of the course is over. We had 404 slides in 3 days, but still have to actually discount the time of the 6 case presentations (15 minutes, plus at least 10 minutes discussion each) from the overall discussion time.
Now remains the question of how to review so many slides. And I have to admit, every slide was there for a reason and they were well used, so the unusually high number is justified.
But let me go to sleep. It has been a long day and I have to wake up early tomorrow to do some reading before class.
And some good news: I am scheduling interviews with two other companies, my efforts from last week are paying off.

When designing your presentation, create some extra slides anticipating some of the questions that the audience will post at the end. It will certainly impress the heck all of them if, besides answering the question well, you have a graph or other evidence to support your point. And you can still use the Q&A time to present that extra idea you are so fond of, but hat to strike from the main presentation because of time constraints.

So another couple of days has passed and it's time for some more impressions of Kingston and Queen's. So far, so good. I am really happy with my choice. The courses have been great so far. Demanding and interesting, relevant. There is still a bit of schedule conflict for me to solve, but I am enjoying it.
The class is very close knit. Of course, they have been together for 8 months now and know each other very well. But that doesn't make them less welcoming, and it has been very easy to get to know lots of people. I won't probably get to know everyone, as the class is really big, almost as big as in Warwick, and everyone is taking different courses.
For this first block of 3 weeks the options are:

• Financing new ventures
• Problem solving and consulting
• Marketing strategy
  
• Corporate valuation & mergers and acquisitions

So far I have been to all classes, but am actually enrolled in the first two. Tomorrow I will audit marketing again and it might be possible to take it as a third course, but I will have to see if I manage the work load.
Because of the schedule conflict I mentioned, I was not able to take the second session of PSC (or PBL, as you wish) and the first one was not enough to evaluate the course well.
Mergers and acquisitions seems to be the most demanding course. The teacher impressed me, but, since it really isn't what I want to work with, I will forego this one.
I guess I already wrote a bit about marketing, either here or on twitter, but the class I attended was really good. It was looooong, 6 hours with breaks, but it was very interesting. I will audit as many as possible or even take it as real course.
FNV is extremely interesting. Mainly because it is all new and very valuable information taught by people who really know what they are talking about and have real and hard market experience. So, as you can see, I can't complain.

Today the class went out for the first time. It seems that there is the Thursday out tradition around here. They call it the point four club. It seems that there has been a study somewhere stating that, if you go out once a week, the negative effect on your GPA is only o.4%. I'm not sure of the origin, so maybe one of my new colleagues will correct me.

And today we went to a new sports bar near my house and it was fun. Having, for the first time, really time to talk to some of the new people and playing, for the first time, the Wii I know so well from the marketing assignment from last term. I'll definetely taking part on the future instances of this even, so don't bother trying to chat with me on Thursdays evenening.
And I am ripe for bed. I want to post one more thing, then I'm gone.

Today we had 4 group presentations for the Market Analysis course. Each group got one company to analyse and explain to the class why it had found the company to be an example of a marketing success story and which criteria the group used to get to its conclusion.

My group was first and, I must admit, the best. The guys did a great job in researching, analysing and presenting the material. Sascha's slide looked great and the story we told was compelling. Of course, we chose the most fun subject: Sony vs. Wii. Really interesting case, I can only advise you to take a look at Nintendo's President's series of internal interviews, quite rich.

The other groups also did a great job. The BAA group with the noisy jet sounds and the great consumer type incenations were really memmorable.

The Boeing group packaged the presentation in a virtual flight with stewardess (oh, flight attendant, sorry), captain and first officer. Of course, in my humble oppinion, they couldn't have chosen a prettier flight attendant.

By the fourth group I must admit I was already really tired. They talked about Samsung, and now I will take a look at their mobile handsets. I am looking for a new one, and Sony Ericsson seems to have what I want. But the presentation convinced me to give Samsung a chance. What I also liked was that they were critical enough to cast some doubts on the sustainability of the current strategy.
All in all it was an interesting morning, eventhough it extended far too much into hour already reduced lunch hour. I believe the teacher was too optimistic by reserving only 25 minutes per group.