1. SWOT Analysis

Strength	Action
Ability to articulate	Communicate well with the group, and make sure everyone understands the tasks
Leadership	Can take control and see what needs to be done, and I can be the one delegating tasks
Good Work Ethic	Continue to achieve this semester: to not let the team’s high standard down and do my best individually
Organisation	Stay on the ball and on top of work: be the ‘deadline’ watcher of the group and make sure everyone is handling their individual components
Weakness	Action
Tend to avoid reading the textbook until late in the semester	Set aside time and plan the reading of the textbook to not fall behind Join the system with my group in which someone does the chapters’ reading each week, summarises and shares.
Procrastination	Be aware of activities or things I am doing that are not productive and stop immediately; Remind myself of the good feeling of productive work.
Believing I am time poor	Make the most out of spare pockets of time at uni and at home Dedicate time to researching Don’t be afraid to say no to going out when I need to study!
Opportunity	Action
Group Work with some people I’ve previously worked with	Don’t assume I know everything about people in the group I’ve worked with before Don’t be disappointed that I’ll be working with new members and that the group dynamic has changed
Experience from last semester’s simulation	Use last semester’s reflection and personal suggestions as a motivational tool for the Capstone simulation
Threat	Action
Extra Curricular Activities	Remember my priorities: It may sound obvious, but uni work comes first. Never let them be a detriment to your grades.
The Flu: already behind on my readings and organisation	Let go of the fact that I am behind, no need to feel guilty, and catch up quickly: dedicate more time to catch up.
Part-time work	Concentrate on part-time work when at work, and allocate other times in the week to study. Do not spend weeknights tending to extracurricular commitments.
Motivation Lapse	Keep this plan handy in the diary, update my progress by hand in any spare moments I have.

2. Short and Long Term Objectives

Some Short Term Objectives (time frame one week) included:

• Read the textbook and look up tables etc referred to in lectures
• Finish reading Capstone Manager's Guide
• Examine Capstone star system and performance measures (we went over this in the W6 tute.)
• Consolidate the information we have from Amazon articles I’ve read by creating structured notes
• Consider the relevant matrices/diagrams/typologies/models for Amazon
• Work on Amazon headliner presentation slides

Long Term Objectives (time frame one semester) included:

• Find new and different places to find research and find ideas that enhance my interest in marketing. Don’t just use research methods I’ve used in the past.
• Increase my WAM this semester compared to the previous two semesters
• Improve my personal skills of organisation, motivation and concentration, and minimising procrastination

3. Group Work With Capstone

The group members I worked with in Capstone were Amanda Hanna, Sharon Lieberman, Michelle Sion and Catherine Vo. Catherine was the only group member I haven’t worked with before. I have known Amanda, Sharon and Michelle since second year, and I found working with people I knew such an advantage because I had spent time getting to know them. This meant I already their attitudes towards work and commitment, and being with them always made marketing very social and fun. However, it was sometimes difficult to include Catherine, especially as she only attended uni two days a week because of part-time work. It was therefore very difficult to include her in all of our simulation meetings, and by the end of the simulation we had not really changed our group meeting approach to find a solution. However, after seeing how other groups approached their group work, I think if we specialised by product and perhaps used phone communication more, we would have accommodated Catherine’s lifestyle situation more. For more details about group work and our approach to Capstone, please refer to the Appendix, “What I Learnt from the Simulation.”

4. Amazon.com Audit

I worked with Sharon and Michelle for the Amazon audit. I am pleased to say that the result was truly a team effort. Initially, our group were interested in the corporate strategies of both Dove and Amazon.com. After extensive research into both, we decided on Amazon because of a lack of information on Dove's marketing strategy, which was mostly just on IMC. I spent a whole day researching both companies to make an informed decision. In the process I also learnt about Dove’s strategy, which was a bonus. Looking back, Dove’s strategy links in well with Ian Wilkinson’s lecture about the relationship between a company and its environment.
Applying the theoretical frameworks we have learnt to Amazon’s strategy was much easier than I expected. There have been a lot of courses during my degree where I have had to explore the “practical applications” of the theory but found it very difficult to link theory to real life, mainly because the models have been too abstract, mathematical or so disparate from the information that I found about the company. In contrast, I found that there was a huge variety and depth of information available in which strategic marketing theory could be applied. From my research, one of the things that stood out was an interview with Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, in which he expressed disdain for the company’s early corporate strategy. Here he was, talking very normally about what happened in his own casual words, but it was rich with material to analyse from a strategic perspective.

5. Lecture and Course Content

Textbook Reading

Myself and three other friends (Amanda Hanna, Sharon Lieberman and Michelle Sion) decided to divide up the textbook readings between the four of us so that we wrote notes for four chapters each and then shared them amongst ourselves. This is the first time we’ve done this. From what I’ve found so far, notes from other people haven’t been very beneficial because it’s hard to understand what points the notes are referring to, and after reading them my understanding lacks depth. This has especially been an issue since a lot of the lecture and tutorial content refers to tables and diagrams in the textbook. To be honest I have only read four chapters of the textbook in depth and would like to complete all of the readings before the exam. I would not recommend this note-sharing technique but it may work for some people, depending on their learning styles.

Further Reading

I haven’t had any particular plan when it came to further reading. I mainly looked at marketing literature or authors that were referred to in tutorials or lectures. One example was David Packard’s quote, “Marketing is far too important to leave to the marketing department,” was a good springboard into learning about the author, his reasoning and what this quote has been applied to. I found out that David Packard was from Hewlett-Packard, and my research also led me to some other articles on marketing by consultants such as Peter Drucker. I also found regularly read B& T and AdNews, which had lots of interesting examples of how Australian companies have approached new media and future marketing.

A big difficulty for me when it came to further reading was that I have a bit of an aversion to the Business section of the newspaper or to financial magazines. Furthermore, because I am not studying accounting or finance I did not feel like I needed to sift through the scary financial jargon. However, from my research I realised that I found it a lot easier and more digestible to look at online content such as the Forbes website.

I found allocating the time for wider reading quite difficult because I always found something more immediate to such as working on an assessment task. I think what I can do in future is remind myself that reading marketing articles online is an enjoyable way to take a break from my other work and a good way to stimulate critical and analytical thinking.

Tutorial Work

I’m glad that the course was not limited to content in the textbook, especially since one of the most enjoyable tutorials I’ve had out of any subject this semester involved analysing the IMC of the Blair Witch Project and the Simpsons Movie. I also enjoyed the Great Marketing Debate because the topics needed a lot of integration from the concepts we have learnt, and it also gave a taste of the high level of thinking and analysis that I need to be prepared for in the final exam.

My Favourite Lecture: Relations and Networks in Business

I was really captivated by Ian Wilkinson's guest lecture on relations and networks in business. To me, it is what is exciting about the changing shape of marketing theory. New ways of creating and maintaining relationships and networks is a very future-oriented marketing topic. But what was most interesting was the way that these theories tied together ideas from lots of different disciplines: economics, evolutionary science, game theory, biology, modern art, and computer science. Although I have a year until I decide whether I’d like to do honours, I found this topic by far one of the most interesting and it is something I’d like to explore further.

6. Evaluation of my Performance and Progress

I think I have made progress over the semester as to how I have approached my learning, but I have identified things I still need to work on. Overall, I have found the course very different to the marketing subjects I've done before, which tended towards the rote-learn from the textbook formula. I found that it was refreshing to be treated as more independent students and to be encouraged to use different resources.

Areas that I think I improved:

From my experience in the simulation as one of the group that Marion dubbed the "Flower Girls", I have learnt that when things don't go your way, the game can turn around quickly if you put a lot of effort into it and stay optimistic. Although this was hard during the initial rounds, I'm glad we learned a lot from it and improved instead of floundering.

I improved my research skills from the Amazon audit. Instead of just using journal databases similar to what I did in the past, I used different types of references and search techniques.

I've realised that further reading can be interesting! I especially found that articles in B & T and AdNews were interesting and relevant.

In terms of organisation, I completed tasks and assessments without stress and sometimes well in advance of the deadline. I think a lot of this was due to my short-term goal planning, which I found very useful. It made me think more about what I needed to do, and by putting it on paper, my tasks seemed a lot clearer.

I have increased my self-awareness of my work attitudes and my organisation from doing the Personal plan. What I found most beneficial was that it gave me time to think about what I was trying to achieve, and I could compare that to what I was actually doing. A lot of the time we tend to just do things without thinking about them so I found the personal plan and the Capsim reflection very beneficial.

What I think I could improve on:

I could have been more self-aware and stuck to the reading tasks in the short term goals section negotiated personal plan. Specifically, I did not do the supplementary textbook reading each week, and this may have hindered my consolidation of material. Indeed, although I understood the typologies and models, I sometimes seemed to have trouble recalling the details.

Although I learnt a lot about Capstone, more importantly I learnt a lot about group work dynamics, which I found was surprising given I have done group work throughout my degree. I've realised that although collaboration is useful, sometimes too many cooks spoil the broth, and there were huge inefficiencies in how we managed our Capstone decisions among 5 people. Indeed, because we were not making much progress in our meetings, our meetings became quite stressful and less enjoyable. In future I will stop and take time to think about the best way to approach group work, instead of continuing with ways that I know have been successful in the past for groups of 3-4, or for our previous simulation in session one. Adapting to changes has been constantly emphasised throughout the course and I didn't realise until now that it applied so well to our approach to Capstone group work. I think that what I learnt from this is valuable to the way I will approach group work and corporate team work in the future.

To summarise, one of the most important things I have gained from this course is a huge amount of self-awareness, self-monitoring and the ability to take a step back before starting things. I have also learnt that adapting to change isn't something that should necessarily apply to big changes such as external impacts to a company; change can be there in the little things as well in daily life, and it is each individual's job to look out for them before it is too late.

7. Appendix. Capstone: What Have I Learnt?

The Game: Why Did We Have Problems Initially and How did we Improve?

Corporate Strategy. We started off using a product life cycle strategy with differentiation in all segments except for low end. However we found that it took too long for segments to move so the specifications of the products were in the right position, and it also cost money to promote the repositioned products into a new market (eg. from high end to traditional segments). From our problems, we decided to drastically change to a broad differentiation strategy. We learnt quickly and put in a lot of effort, ending up with good profits by the end.

Financing. We experienced finance problems, needing emergency loans during the
first two rounds and suffered from the follow-on effects of high interest. To fix this, we took out a large long-term loan because another discovery was the assumption that we would not have to pay it back, as loans were for 10 years and the simulation only lasted for seven. From cost-benefit analysis, the interest we paid was well worth it.
We followed the market leader by investing in automation rather than increasing capacity. We sold capacity to finance automation when we were short on cash.

Business Strategy. We did not have a set of individual strategies for each product, but our overall goal was to fulfil customer segment criteria as much as possible. We looked for opportunities, such as launching a new product in the high end. From capacity and automation decisions we also learnt the importance of forward planning.

Marketing Strategy. One reason for our early failures was our low contribution margins. Profits rose quickly as we set prices more carefully. Low accessibility and awareness was a big reason why we performed poorly initially, and we quickly deciphered that this was a critical factor predicting sales. Building on existing awareness and accessibility was an important driver of sales for our competitors.

Monitoring. The forecasting method we found most effective was looking at sales of competitors with similar promotion and sales budgets and product specifications. Forecasting could have been more carefully analysed, and monitoring and recording could have been more extensive, especially in determining automation and capacity.

Group Work and Time Management
Our group met up before each decision in the computer labs and all five of us made decisions. This gave everyone a say, but was inefficient: during some meetings we only finished the R & D section. If we didn’t finish, with five people in the group it was hard to manage our schedules to find another meeting time. During the later stages of the simulation when there were two decisions a week, we had two people collaborating their ideas on the phone, and the rest of the group checked the decisions and brought up any issues they had. This was more efficient, but the same people tended to make the decisions. I found the optimal schedule for decision deadlines was one a week, because two in a week took up a lot of time, and once per fortnight was a too long a period. I did not find the mid-session break decision a problem. The formal CEO structure was not used and we did not have defined roles, although we did have an informal group co-ordinator based on her organisation and personality.

What We Did Well: As soon as we identified that we were in trouble, we tried our best to not become demotivated, acted quickly and worked hard to improve.

Two Other Things That Could be Improved:

• I think another reason we had problems was because not everyone in the group understood the material initially. Each group member could specialise in a product. Before the meeting each group member could make the decisions for the product they are responsible for, then during the meeting everyone would check them and make the rest of the decisions collaboratively.

• View training tutorials and do the practice simulation together so that we know that everyone has done it. Those who understand can explain the concepts to other group members.