Category: MBA Content

  • Pricing your Product

    Pricing a product (or service) is hard, and there’s no set way of doing it – but there are few things to bear in mind. Cost Plus Pricing If it costs you $100 to make a product, it might make sense to price it at, say $120 to give you a $20 margin. This does…

  • Finance Glossary for Dummies

    Like technology, finance is an area replete with cool sounding words that no one outside finance understands. The dirty secret – they rarely mean anything complicated. So here’s a simple glossary of terms to help you understand what the hell finance people are talking about. Debt: Money that you owe to someone. Equity: Money that…

  • Perception Of Pricing

    Evil marketing at its finest: We all know that price promotions usually give an uptick in sales, but it doesn’t matter whether you’re actually cutting price – it only matters whether customers think you’re cutting price. Case in point: GM’s “Employee Discount” pricing, launched on 2005, turned out to be hugely successful for the company…

  • Segmentation Or Identity

    When marketing a product, it’s generally a good idea to split up the market so you can understand more clearly who you’re targeting, and who you’re not. Segmentation The common way of doing this is by segmentation. For example, Ikea normally aims its products at people aged around 30 (among other things) – that’s a…

  • Services Marketing – Starbucks Case Study

    I’m doing a course this term called Services Marketing, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Our latest assignment – head into a Starbucks, and create trouble for them to see how they react. Then repeat with a Dunkin Donuts. Even though I don’t drink coffee, it seemed like too much fun to…

  • Professor Tedlow at the Computer History Museum

    Learning about the birth of the IBM S/360 while at the Computer History Museum is like eating chocolate biscuits wrapped in chocolate as far as I’m concerned. Last week I tasted the goodness. What’s the System/360? Back in the day, you bought a computer and programmed for that computer alone. If you bought another one,…

  • Grey Poupon Case Study

    Ever heard of Grey Poupon? I hadn’t. It turns out that it’s a premium mustard. Here’s an old ad – this, of course, is the British version. As you can see, the ad screams premium branding, and the American version is no different. It’s a good ad – a touch of light comedy, and it…

  • Value Based Pricing

    We received a talk on pricing this evening which I thought was a great illustration. I present it here for your delight. Yep – this post contains pricing theory and fertiliser. Please keep reading? It’s lonely out here, but maybe I should stop mowping Nobody likes a grass Your company, Freddy’s Fertiliser, produces regular fertiliser…

  • Karen May, Executive VP of Global HR, Kraft

    In this evening’s Managerial Leadership class, we were able to welcome Karen, who is a bigwig at Kraft. (For anyone who doesn’t know anything about Kraft, it’s a $35bn company with 104,000 employees.) It turns out that she used to work for our professor at Baxter, so he was able to twist her arm into…

  • The Power Game

    In last week’s Managerial Leadership class, we played a fascinating game directed by Professor Buck. Here’s how to play. Ingredients: 30 or more managers, one dollar each Time to cook: 30 mins Instructions: Take one dollar from each of the managers. Segment out the managers. Make a random 3 top management, a random few middle…