Defining the focus of the research (i.e. the problem/opportunity) is ambiguous since “what to do” is dictated not only by the symptoms but also, and more importantly, by “what can we do” and “what should we do”? To bring focus to such “non-routine” unstructured decisions it is more productive to organize your thinking by first conceptualizing and classifying the issue that is at the core of the “what do we do” question: I call this “Thinking Backward.”
The foundation of Logic is to organize your thinking by classification. The good news is that all academic disciplines, certainly the six major business disciplines (accounting, finance, management, marketing, and Information technology), are essentially nomenclatures of clearly defined words/phrases – called principles, maxims, or concepts – organized in a hierarchal classification system. While thinking backward works in all business disciplines here we are addressing marketing problems/opportunities, so we will focus in that area.
Marketing texts typically classify all marketing knowledge under the following seven broad concepts: Situation Analysis; Target Market Selection; Product; Place (Distribution); Promotion; Price; and, Evaluation of Outcomes. Under these 7 tier-one classifications I have sub-classified 21 concepts that bring more focus to each of the tire-one ideas (e.g. Advertising Budget Formulation” for “Promotion”) and sub-sub-classified another 31 concepts that add even more specificity to those ideas in tier-two (e.g. “Advertising Media Selection” under “Advertising Budget”). Finally, there are 11 marketing concepts that I classify as tier-four ideas as they bridge two or more major ideas (e.g. “Push verses Pull” which synthesizes “Place/Distribution” ideas with” Promotion” concepts.
Here’s the point. When you encounter a situation, such as a project, that is vague and unstructured and about which you are expected to develop, evaluate, and possibly implement alternatives, define the problem/opportunity you will address in terms of something that you – or the organization – can actually change.
If you take the “what can we change” approach for a marketing project and you will immediately narrow the scope of your project to deciding on one of five alternative themes since there are only five tier-one marketing concepts that address management-initiated change: Target Market Selection and the 4Ps (Product; Distribution; Promotion; and, Price). You may find that drilling down to tier-two or even to a tier-three concept addresses the symptoms better, just remember you must make a logical argument – with evidence i.e. analysis, synthesis, and evaluation – of why you are focusing your research on one – or more – of those 5 areas.
Explain your answers to the following four questions to Think Backwards and conceptualize – and thus frame – what you see as the underlying Marketing Problem or Opportunity you need to address in your project:
Step One: What exactly is your client marketing: what are they are “offering” for sale to consumers or business buyers? Start by classifying the offering using the criteria below, then define (or speculate): the offering type (e.g. Oreo is a cookie in the biscuit category); customer type(s) buying their offering (e.g. consumer or businesses – B2B); value the customers gain from acquiring their offering, and the geographic region(s) in which your client is marketing their offering.
Commercial product or service, Oreo cookies or Starbuck’s
Place, e.g. a team park or a city seeking visitors or business investments
Person, e.g. an executive placement firm or your applying for grad school
Social cause, e.g. smoking cessation or bans on GMFs
Political candidate or cause
Fund raising for a non-for-profit organization
Step Two: What are the symptoms(s) that have triggered the research?
Step Three: Which business discipline most directly addresses the symptoms (in this course that will always be marketing).
Step Four: Of the five marketing areas that management can change, which one most closely addresses the symptoms.
After you have thought backward from the symptoms to a very broad definition of what’s causing those symptoms and identified a marketing concept, you can use to frame how you will manage your project, then, you can move forward.
Forward Thinking requires more focus and synthesis: begin this process by using tier-two Situation Analysis concepts as well as tier-two or tier-three ideas under the concept you used to frame your problem/opportunity. Use suggestions in the Handbook and Bridge concepts to make insightful links between the concepts: for example, Product Life Cycle is typically related to the Competitive Market Structure in most product market categories.
You will need to continue to narrow your perspective until you can clearly identify several alternative “courses of action” (i.e. solutions). From this point you will want to start widening your perspectives as you explore ways to evaluate both the cost and the benefit of each alternative. This Backward and Forward thinking is like an Hourglass: broad at the beginning and ending but very focused in the middle.