Marketing Management & Luck

The exam for Marketing Management was today and let's just say that I got moving a bit late in the semester when it came to preparing for it. In the end I didn't even have time to delve that deeply into Kotler & Keller, but thankfully there were rather decent summaries at the end of each chapter which helped create a rather good high level view of what the course was about. Additionally the questions in the exam couldn't have been better for me.

They'd also done away with the multiple choice questions part, which has traditionally been the hit or miss part of the exam. I stumbled a bit in the first exercise in which you were to explain various terms briefly. The maximum was 10 points, I'll venture a guess that I should get about five.

Then there were the essays. Three essay choices and you had to answer two. The two I did were on differentiation (what is it, what are the different dimensions of it and then examining how IKEA differentiates itself from the competition) and segmentation (what is it, when should it be done, advantages/disadvantages and then how the traditional segmentation model differed from the "Strategic Segmentation" concept which was discussed at a lecture). And best of all, English was allowed. Overall I'd say that the exam went extremely well considering the amount of effort I put into it.

I'm starting to get to the conclusion that school, in fact, isn't that difficult at this level either. It's just a question of optimizing workload and goals. I'm satisfied enough to have a grade average of 3 or higher, preferrably closer to 4 than 3. Of course 5s would be nice, but they're hardly worth the extra effort, especially if that extra mile would most likely increase the required effort by an additional 40-50%. Oh, and right now I'm becoming increasingly certain that I indeed want to do my minor at the dept. of industrial engineering and management.