Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Speaker Day 1/28 (Graham)

This guest speaker day made me feel very uncomfortable about my knowledge of course-related material.  A majority of the time was spent taking a business and identifying its key partners and activities, customer relations, cost structure, revenue streams, and the like.  Although this provided a lot of insight on how to go about elaborating on a business idea (to find out how it may work), a lot of the material discussed was previously unfamiliar (for example, cost structures).  It made me understand the complexity about obtaining a good business idea, but I feel like I may expect to learn about those types of relations later in the course before being able to apply them better.

The speaker also discussed different “models,” for lack of a better term (I’m sure the term, model, refers to something else), of businesses.  The models would list whether the business concept was good or bad, whether the marketing was good or bad, and whether the cost was low or high, and would output the income level of the business.  I found it interesting how a bad idea with good marketing and a low cost could even take off, but then again, good marketing even can bring people to buy snake oil as a weight-loss tool.  To me, it seems the success of a business is almost solely dictated by how well it was marketed.  If a product targets the right audience, as determined through monetary expenditure on surveying, polling, and the like, then the product should be expected to sell (although a good idea of a product would likely sell better).

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