“Innovation” “New” “Creative” “Differentiation” “Disruption” “Customer Experience” – there are many buzzwords in business and marketing. But what do they mean? How can they be applied? In a world filled with messages, ads, noise, it is hard for your consumers to hear your message.

So how do you stand out? That is always the million-dollar question in Marketing.

A few weeks ago we had some fantastic classes around the 3 C’s of pricing: Customers, Competitors, Company. Our lectures were focused around Customer and Competitor pricing as these 2 drive a lot of the pricing decisions in the current market.
We worked with Nielsen Company to look at some real case examples as well as were tasked with certain objectives and had the ability to use one of their pricing tools to do so. Both cases were very interesting and fun to play around with the pricing simulator.

When approaching pricing there are many questions to look at from the price, distributions, competitor’s pricing offering, etc., and to be able to look at in the sense of should we introduce a new product line? If so how and at what price to increase revenue as well as market share. Definitely skills that we as Master’s students can take with us as we look for internships and jobs.

Another interesting discussion was based around the Product Management focusing on the current Market Trends. We had a professor give a great presentation and discussion around The Unicorn Club – Companies that achieve $1 Billion + in Market Valuation and how it has become increasingly crowded with notable companies such as Facebook, Snapchat, Uber, etc. (photo attached).

We discussed the 4 Keys to Success:

  • Quickly build a customer base – this is very important as customers drive everything.
  • Experience- in todays world the customer experience is even more important than the product.
  • Pivoting – the ability to change your product, even radically, based on what your customers are saying.
  • Be fast! – now more than ever you have to be fast, fast to deliver, fast to enhance, fast to change, if you don’t, you will be left behind.