Essay Questions
1. You are in charge of all marketing activities in North America for the Italian luxury sports car manufacturer Maserati. Maserati has just introduced a new model that will be competing directly against well-known luxury sports cars such as Porsche. Ferrari, Jaguar, and BMW.
How would you position the new Maserati model? How would you establish and support this positioning strategy?
Note: Although Maserati equals competitors performance and design, it is a small company and has less money than competitors for promotion.
2. A pharmaceutical manufacturer followed sales representatives in the field to observe some 150 interactions between sales reps and physicians and support staff. They watched sales reps approach the doctors. how they got around their gatekeepers, how they delivered their brands' messages, and so forth. These observations led to improvements in training new reps.
In what category of research would this study fall? Provide advantages and disadvantages of this category of research. What would be the next step in the marketing research process?
3. Abraham Maslow sought to explain why people are driven by particular needs at particular times. How does Maslow's theory help marketers? How might you use Maslow's hierarchy of needs in marketing cell phones in the U.S. versus Haiti (before the earthquake)? Please develop a marketing research project to gather the data.