Why I love my Brand Management Class...

Because Professor Morgan puts the following picture up on the projector. Genius! We spent 30 minutes discussing the issues with Apple's latest release and the fact that their real tag line, tell the customer nothing. Do they know what the device is supposed to do? Who is the customer? Is the idea to just put it out there and see how the customers use it (and who actually buys it) and then market to do that?

With my brother and my dad HUGE Apple fans it was great to hear someone stick to Steve Jobs, and critique the company's strategy. I look forward to seeing how this will be positioned in 6 months and see if all the negative associations the name has (by itself) is erased as Morgan predicts.

What is it REALLY like...

to be a marketer? That was the question of the day yesterday. Our CMA day had a panel of 6 recent alums who talked candidly about their jobs and the cultures of their company so we could get a better sense of what we can expect during our internships. Then we had 4 break-out sessions with them to work on some cases that they have had to work on. It was a lot of fun and they ranged from how do we evaluate what is important to the customer nutritionally to how do we set up our planogram. It was nice after being bogged down with our case competition to be reminded why we are here.

We finished up at about 3, I vegged for a bit and then headed to the grocery store to pick up our turkey. Then it was time for my first "Ladies Club" dinner. We went to Cafe Django, an Asian fusion restaurant. It was pretty good and it was fun for all of us to celebrate the holiday.

It's weird not having to go to school today, or not having to do research. I have a feeling today will be filled with a lot of cleaning, packing and working on my exam for CMA. But what an improvement over case comp! Yay for Thanksgiving break!

Although I am sure to people outside of the MBA program, my life everyday looks a lot like Taz tearing through a scene, today seemed to be the epitome of it.

Classes started late for me today, so I dropped Charlton off and grabbed my dry cleaning from NAWMBA so I would be ready for the case comp this week. Then I read and wrote some emails before jumping right into the econ case on Brazil. When my brain couldn’t take in any more information on inflation and interest rates we escaped from 1050 to go play the “beer game” simulation for ops.

Everyone had a role in a 4 stage supply chain of a beer manufacturer. I ended up with the Distributor role, and after 6 simulated weeks thought I was doing fantastically, and then a monster order came in and killed my inventory. I had such a huge backlog by the end of the session I had to actually use a calculator to get my numbers! Although, we didn’t end up in last place so we weaseled out of having to tidy, but as we didn’t win no cash prize for us! And what better way to understand the bullwhip effect than to see it happen in person, over pocket change instead of in the real world when you have customers screaming at you.

I had just enough time for a quick bite to eat before I had 3 informational interviews with second years regarding their internship searches and their roles in Kelley Women. Finally at about 4:45 I got to head home and prep for another informational interview. By the time 7 rolled around I had to unbury myself from all the emails I got over the day and try to get a handle on whats ahead. Still getting there, is it really only Monday?

Done with Day One

So I kicked off the first day of school with a bad start:

• Burnt Charlton’s breakfast
• Had the dog run after some deer (which resulted in me running after her for 5 minutes)
• Had printer issues at school so i end up missing my finance slides for class

But then the day turned around. Not like choirs singing or anything but it went pretty well after that. Today I had finance, econ and operations. I got cold called in econ and survived and I felt adequately prepared for everything. Had my resume writing workshop after class and got a pretty awesome review on it (just needed a few grammar tweaks) Then it was time to come home, get some more studying done (lots of reading for my management case discussion on weds), grabbed a quick dinner here at the house before heading back to IU to see Guy Kawasaki speak. It was such a cool talk, I ended up with pages and pages of notes…hopefully I will be able to apply some of his lessons.

But since my Myers Briggs says I like lists here is what I accomplished today:

• Turned in team charter
• Revised resume
• Turned in academy application
• Wrote my SAC application
• Turned in my SAC application
• Read Mondavi case for MGMT and did an okay outline of the case
• Read module for weds econ class including text
• Watched two portions of the finance video lecture series

The sad thing is, even with all that I got done today I have loads more I didn’t even get a chance to start. Gotta keep treading!