Week 9 Reading Reflection

Week 9: Kuratko Ch. 10 (Marketing Challenges for Entrepreneurial Ventures)

As I read chapter 10 I realized how important social media is in marketing. Don’t get me wrong, I always knew it played a big part, but I guess I didn’t quite realize how irrelevant other methods of marketing are becoming. Through social media and mobile apps companies can reach all the masses, in all corners of the world. I’m really looking forward to really placing an emphasis on this when it comes the time to start my own business.

One of things that I found interesting but a bit difficult to understand was the section on Marketing Philosophy. I understand the overall concept but, personally, the author wasn’t very clear.

If I could ask the author two questions they would be as follow:

 Considering how quickly the art of marketing has changed in the past few years, where do you see it heading in 5 years, or even 10?

How important do you consider the use of a “freemium model” for start-ups?

The reason I ask the first question is to possibly get a better understanding or at least a well educated guess as to where marketing is heading. The second question is due to recent questioning of companies such as Snapchat, that although being hugely popular, they fail to make much money.

One of the things I didn’t agree with the author was on his thoughts on Market Segmentation. He talks about using demographics, but we know that in this day and age that can be extremely difficult and wasteful. The reason is because we live in a changing world with a big mixture of taste across demographics. It is now harder than ever to place people into different groups solely based on race, religion, etc.