Sunday, April 27, 2003

Exams tomorrow, for the next three days; you may not hear much from me during that time.  There is a short window of opportunity on Wednesday afternoon, in between the end of exams and my boarding time at the airport, but I'll do my best. Be well, everyone.   8:19:44 PM    comment []

From Paul Graham's latest essay; I wish everything I read was so eloquent: Some kinds of waste really are disgusting. SUVs, for example, would arguably be gross even if they ran on a fuel which would never run out and generated no pollution. SUVs are gross because they're the solution to a gross problem. (How to make minivans look more masculine.) But not all waste is bad. Now that we have the infrastructure to support it, counting the minutes of your long-distance calls starts to seem niggling. If you have the resources, it's more elegant to think of all phone calls as one kind of thing, no matter where the other person is.   6:06:58 PM    comment []

One reason that Lucky hates marketing: in the answer key to the question 1 (d), "the value of Kathon MWX to the customer (try to express this in a number)", there is no number.  Only a vague description of what some nameless quantitative expression should include. This may make sense to the professor, but it doesn't make much sense to students studying marketing.  Perhaps I'll point this out to him later, in the same email where I point out that the last page of the case was missing from the handout.   4:57:14 PM    comment []

Studying is going OK.  I finished Finance last night at 2am, and was in bed by 3.  The familiar air of fatigue has arrived in my bones like an unwelcome house guest who will be staying for four days. Marketing is done, mostly.  To give you a flavor of what the exam will be like, this is the practice final, to be completed after reading the HBS case Rohm and Haas, of average length at 14 pages: Question 1 (worth 50%) Please develop a strategic analysis with respect to: The nature of the product The industry structure and competitive offerings The magnitude of market potential in this underdeveloped market The value of Kathon MWX to the customer (try to express this in a number) The nature of the channels Question 2 (worth 50%) What is the appropriate strategy for marketing a Kathon MWX type of product?  (e.g. push vs. pull, high price vs. low price, ...) Do you believe that Kathon MWX is a good fit between Rohm and Haas' resources and capabilities and the market's requirements?  If yes, why, and if no, why not?     3:21:25 PM    comment []