The Final Blog: A Truly Insightful Semester

All of our lectures this semester have been extremely insightful and valuable. That being said, I believe that I especially learned a lot about the topic of segmentation from lecture. I had always approached segmentation through the more traditional approached discussed during lecture. However, I had never segmented using the more untraditional approach of segmenting on the basis of needs. In fact, I always thought that the point of segmenting was to then research the market segment identified to uncover their unmet needs. I was shocked to find out how segmenting groups on the basis of needs before the actual research began could provide such invaluable insights. For example, for our group project covering the Phase 1 Segmentation update, my group worked on segmenting 15-17 year old boys on the basis of what we saw as being potential needs experienced by this group, both functional and emotional. One of the functional needs that we segmented our group on was the need for entertainment, and to our great surprise, this segmenting aspect ended up becoming a huge part of our overall project. By addressing this as a part of our segmentation right up front, we were prepared to question the boys we interviewed later in the semester about their entertainment needs in the bathroom. And to our amusement, every single boy that we interviewed expressed a need for entertainment in the bathroom. In fact, they just about begged for it. Had we not addressed this untraditional way of segmenting, we may not have been able to lead the boys down this path that later led to the creation of our final product.

The second topic that really had an impact of me from this semester was from the creativity and innovation lecture. I gained two very important insights from this lecture, one about being creative in groups and one about myself. The first insight from this topic came from the exercise at the beginning in which each team was given instructions for creating captions for a cartoon. Previous to this exercise, my group had hit a bit of a road block. I think that we were just having difficulty in escaping our comfort zone and not being afraid to truly think outside of the box. However, after working on this exercise together, we came up with our final product almost instantly. I think that it was because this exercise forced us to be creative and gave us an opportunity to throw out all of our ideas (even the silliest) under the pretence that we were contributing and that was what was important. This then allowed for us to get even more comfortable with each other as group members and to really open up. It taught me that creativity is often just the result of people trusting themselves enough to take things from a new perspective. Also, you have to be comfortable enough to run each of your ideas by your team members otherwise your team might suffer by not being able to implement or build on your ideas. Secondly, I learned something very interesting about me as an innovator. I had never realized that innovators could be described as either conceptualists or experimentalists. However, during the lecture it became clear to me that I am more of a conceptualist. This also helped me during the innovative stages of designing our product. I knew from lecture that as a conceptualist I needed to understand all of the underlying ideas and aspects of our product before I would be truly ready to construct it. This allowed me a framework for designing and thinking about our product. It was important to me to know that I could not expect myself to jump into building something without having all of the details worked out, and I think that it helped me contribute a lot towards the final product.

Overall, I had a really enjoyable project experience. This was one of the more interesting projects that has been assigned to me in college, and I really feel like I learned a lot from the whole experience. For the most part, my team was incredible. There were four of us (myself included). Unfortunately, we did have one member that literally contributed about 1% towards our entire project. That one person’s lack of commitment towards this assignment put a severe strain on the other three of us. Consequently, we often found ourselves struggling and having to do a lot more work than would have been necessary had that one other group member decided to contribute like they were supposed to. However, aside from that one individual, my other two team members were incredible. They worked so hard and were extremely creative. It would not have been possible for us to have come up with as complex of a product as we did had it not been for such creativity. We all got along really well, and our brain storming sessions were always extremely efficient. It was truly an honor to work with two such talented students, and it is individuals like them that make me so proud of our school. They are definitely a huge part of why I enjoyed this project so much and felt that I learned a lot, especially about how to push away from my comfort zone. Additionally, working with Professor Walls has been an incredible experience. I have never met someone so passionate about marketing. He posseses an incredible amount of knowledge not found in the typical textbook. It was his unique perspective and insights that allowed us to be able to more easily think outside of the box. Professor Walls helped us out tremendously on our project, especially on group work days. He was always willing to lead us in the right direction while encouraging us to really push our own boundaries. Also, I loved that the project was broken up into various “updates.” This allowed us to evolve with our project learnings and findings throughout the semester. I truly do believe that by working on each piece separately from all of the others it allowed us to gain a better grasp on whatever aspect of the project we were working on at that time.

Thanks Professor Walls and Donghua. It has been a really great semester, and this class has been so interesting and helpful. Have a great summer!