The Good Products Course is on its way. I linked a schedule to my last post, and in this one I am including the reading assignments from my book here, in case you are interested. They are very similar to the ones at the ends of the chapter of the book, only more limited in extent because they need to be read and commented upon (private school, high tuition, feedback required).
The first meeting was devoted to organizing and describing the course, figuring out who the students were, etc.
At the second meeting, Bonnie Wan, the CEO of The Way We Live, gave an excellent presentation of non quantitative marketing research and what can be done with it. She gave several interesting examples, my favorite being a study performed for a computer game company that wanted to find out more about the culture of street and canyon racers so that they could improve a racing game they sell. As in most social science research, this required that the people doing the study become accepted by the drivers (young, male, car-freak thrill seekers). This was unusually difficult, because street and canyon racing, although definitely existing late at night in areas such as Southern California, are illegal. But they succeeded in the study, and an interesting part is that street racing (city streets) and canyon racing (mountains and the opportunity to go over a cliff if you make a mistake) attract very different people. Street racing is apparently all about cars, and canyon racing all about drivers. Street racers are into macho, and canyon racers skill. There are, of course similarities. For instance, members of both cultures require extremely high adrenaline levels. Sounds like another version of the different values of drag racers and of sports car racers. The reason for her talk was to discuss methods of better understanding cultures and emotions and their relation to products.
I also said a few words about the course and the book, and dropped in a few examples. I will show you a few photos I used in my next post. If you are in the class and reading this, you have seen them. But in the future I will include more photos in my posts because of the lack of same in the book, and will not be showing them in the class.
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