iClass - a Learning Management System

The 5 C’s of marketing helps you understand the market. They include the following:

1. Company – Here, you need to understand who you are as a company, what products you are offering, your strengths and weaknesses.
2. Collaborators – You need to identify who you are working with to deliver values. Then you think of how you can grow and foster the relationship.
3. Customer – You should know who your target and current customers are. Are you satisfying their needs?
4. Competition – Who are your primary competitors? Are there any substitutes? Are there emerging businesses or technologies that can impact you? What is your unique selling point and are you leveraging on it? These are the questions you need to ask.
5. Context/Climate – What’s going on in the industry? Are there any laws or regulations that can impact you? What trends in the economy can impact you?

Eureka! I found it. There is actually a law behind forming contractions in English, and it states thus; that the apostrophe is used where a letter or letters are missing. For example:

I have = I’ve

Do not = don’t

We are = we’re

I had = I’d

Is not = isn’t

As I suspected the law isn’t exhaustive but that’s acceptable. There is always that exception to the rules:

Will not = won’t

I have made countless errors in trying to use contractions and while auto-correct has been a great help in correcting many of these errors, it feels good to know I can finally understand how these contractions are formed.

Another lesson learnt form improve your writing grammar tutorial on the University of Bristol’s website.

Marketing can be defined as a set of institution and processes for communicating, delivering and exchanging offering that has value for customers, clients, partners and society at large. Simply put, Marketing is creating value for the customer and society at large.

Marketing Process:

Marketing process entails the following

1. Marketing Analysis

2. Identifying Value

3. Creating Value

4. Sustaining Value

I have always thought of marketing as trying to convince people to buy a product, but I am going to have to unlearn this idea. In the definition of marketing given in our marketing class, we were told it is a set of activities for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchange offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large. The important phrase to remember is value for customers. Marketing harnesses the relationship between the consumer, competitors, and the product.

Another interesting concept was the types of customers: clients, customers and consumers. For example, in a pharmaceutical company; customers will be the pharmacy outlet who buy the drugs for sale, consumers are the patients who need to take the drugs and clients are the doctors who prescribe the drugs.

It’s still a long way to go, to but it’s becoming clear why people choose marketing as a career option. It is not as mundane as I originally thought.

Second semester has begun. How time flies! So we have been introduced to some new courses. Operations Management is one them. 

The course is already reminding me a great deal of ABP. The bottom line being that as managers, we need to master the art of critical thinking in our decision making.

I am sure there would be a lot of takeaways from this course. Let us just look at the definition today but in subsequent blogs, I would attempt a summary of "The Goal".

Operations Management is the set of activities that creates value in the form of goods and services by transforming inputs to outputs.

One key lesson for me as this lockdown winds down is that having time in excess doesn’t translate to increased efficiency. If anything, I have become less efficient. Prior to now, my days were set: I had activities lined up for weekends and after work on weekdays. Saturdays were for clean-up, running errands, some pre-Sunday service activity if need be, and sometimes the rare movie at the cinema. Sunday was the Lord’s Day! And the occasional binge watching of food programmes, crime drama, sports etc.

With the lockdown, the distinction between days have thinned out. I have become a chief procrastinator. I can’t run errands even if I wanted to, but I still don’t clean-up. After all there will be tomorrow, and the next, and the next. Nothing is done on time, and this can be one week late. Now that things are returning to normal, I hope it will be as easy to come out of my current state as my decline into it was.

The past few days have been filled with analyzing 20 years worth of financial statement of 2 companies and somewhat relieved that is it over. It was a war, a fight, in fact, you know the rest. 

 IF any one told me in sophomore year during genetic class that one day I will be somewhat interested in finance, I would have spat out a whole lot of God forbids, said a lot of novenas to St Josemaria against such a treacherous path and called my mum immediately to go and sleep in church. Ok maybe not all that but you get the gist. It was a path not to be ever taken. 

Finance has always been a boring topic for me. I loved the idea of making money but not what goes into. The different rules you had to memorize, or the functions of the bodies or certain policies and how they affect what, etc, too many things to memorize and I was not about that life. I just wanted to meet Warren Buffet and beg him for money as a typical Nigerian girl who wants to show herself.  As far as I was concerned, if it could not be understood and applied then it was not worth trying to memorize. 

Fast forward to now, after a few years of being in the business space as a sales person, these things appeal to me. While working with my group on our CFA presentation, we got more than just doing a couple of ratios and explaining them. We wanted to know why and what affected them as it was not in the financial statements. We even went out of the regular scope to get more explanation as to why a company posted a major loss or why their D/E ratio did not seem to have a straight forward explanation to its figures. It felt like a quest for treasure, the yearning to find out why, almost felt like i was digging for dirt.

 The analysis of different ratios and explanations made me understand the different components a company is made of and also how macro economics affects a business. 

Before now, I have always assumed business was just a matter of plus minus equal to and then profit. Off-course I was aware of operations and different expenses but never how it can be all weighted out or weighted. SGA cost has to be looked at, EBIT, how leveraged is a company and so on. Doing a forecast if this trend continues, how long will a company survive or how much of the net margin will be affected. The dissection part intrigues me.

I must confess, I am still learning. it took me several reads and several "please explain again" to grasp it. I am not there yet but I know I  am a bit above average and that is ok. I can sit in the midst of the financial analyst and understand of what they speak of . IQ hitting 1000 (if that exist) .