Kellogg Modern Marketing Excellence

Final Assignment

Introduction:

For the Final Assignment, you will need to think of a business problem that you are currently working
on. To answer the questions in the Final Assignment you will need to gather customer insights and
create an initiative that you could implement to solve this problem using ideas generated from this
course.

Please follow these guidelines for uploading your assignment:

 The word count included after each question is a guideline for you to estimate how long your
answer should be.
 Save your assignment as a PDF before you upload, and remember not to identify yourself in the
assignment or in the filename that you upload. We would like to keep the process anonymous
to avoid any kind of bias.
 After you upload, please be sure to double check that you have successfully attached your final
assignment and submitted. If you press, “submit” before your assignment is done uploading, it
will not attach successfully.
 We will be unable to upload your assignment and include it in the peer review process after the
deadline -NO EXCEPTIONS. Make sure that you overcome any technical difficulties before the
deadline has passed.
 If you experience any technical difficulties with submitting your final assignment or peer review
scores, please email the support alias BEFORE the deadline. We cannot accommodate emails
received after the deadline.

1
 Final Assignment Questions
1. Provide context for the assignment by answering the following questions. (200 words)
a. What is your role?
b. Which business do you support?
c. Who is your customer or target audience?
d. How has digital disruption affected them?
My role is Control & Compliance Analyst for Vietnam Subsidiary, a back-office function with
the task to maintain the compliance rhythm in the Subsidiary. The work does not have any
engagement with partners or customers, hence, not applicable to apply the theory of modern
marketing. In the context of this course, I assume myself in the role of an Account Executive in
Enterprise and Commercial (EC) sector. My main roles are to execute plans and activities to
achieve annual sales revenue, scorecards, KPIs. I am supposed to be trusted advisor in
technology and Digital Transformation to leaders of big companies (IT managers, Chief
Information Officer).

The business that I support are big companies and enterprises in Vietnam. It mainly
includes companies in manufacturing, banking and services industry.

My customer or target audience is a car manufacturer in Vietnam (T Motor Vietnam

Company – TMV). The company has about 2000 employees and 3 branches located in
the North, Middle and South of Vietnam.

TMV has had digital disruption by moving from on-premises data storage to cloud.
They have changed from old and out-dated version of Office products (Office 2013) to
modern workplace product – Office 365. By doing that, there have been significant
improvements in the way employees work and the quality and productivity in work of
TMV’s employees. Employees can work from anywhere with less hour spent and more
efficiently because of the saving of time with the new features of Office 365. In
addition, TMV saves much more in employees’ travelling cost because of the
application of Skype for business in meeting, etc.

2. Describe the Business Problem that your marketing activity will solve. (200 words)

2
 a. What is the problem? Example: High customer attrition for Office 365
b. Why problem
Business is it important forfacing
currently Microsoft?
to Microsoft is the situation that many opportunities for
selling Office 365 products to customers missed in FY19Q2 resulting in the failure to achieve
sales target for the quarter. This was identified due to an immediate resignation of a Solution
Specialist who was in charge of modern workplace area in EC team. He had a major
contribution in driving the sale of Office 365 products to customers. That there was no hand-
over of work carried out had resulted in the disruption in the communication with customer,
discontinue of customer journey. As a result, potential opportunities to sell modern
workplace products were not properly identified.

This is important for Microsoft as the revenue from the selling of modern workplace (Office
365) products accounted for about 80% of the revenue of EC team and about 28% in the
revenue of the whole Subsidiary. The failure from FY19Q2 will continue if appropriate
marketing plans or process of nurturing customers were not timely executed. Successful in
that will help EC team to achieve the sales commitment for the current quarter, the 2 nd half
and the fiscal year.

3. As part of creating this initiative, you should gather customer insights. Remember that insights go
“beyond the obvious” and should be actionable. (250 words)
a. What are the top three customer insights you have gathered related to this issue?
b. How did you collect these insights?

Related to the business problem as described in question 2, opportunity to sell office 365
products to TMV is one in the list of opportunities missing. Efforts have been taken to get
customer insights into this issue. Top three dilemmas have been identified.

The first insight is the consideration from customer in the feasibility study. Movement from
on-premise data storage to cloud is a significant transformation that require a lot of
considerations. From the discussion with IT heads of TMV, some identified customer’s
concerns are whether the benefit they get from the transformation exceed the cost, whether
their employees got prepared for and adapt with the big changes, what are the automation
plan, after the deployment, if there are any risk exposure, what are the countermeasures, etc.

In addition, security and confidentiality concern is another issue that make TMV consider
before making decision to move to cloud. The questions raised from customer were that
whether their data stored on cloud will be lost, whether Microsoft will hand over their data to
the government when there is request (context of the question: there is new Cybersecurity
law in Vietnam with effective date from 1st January, 2019 giving Government the rights to
enterprises’ data when necessary). 3
 The third insight is the existence of a competitor of Microsoft, Facebook is also approaching
customer with the offer of “Workplace by Facebook” – a Yammer equivalent communication
tools. That Facebook has offered customer with a long period of free trial and deep discount
after trial period has made customer considered about the offer.

To collect these insights, I have had a lot of discussion with customer (IT heads, IT staff)
through email, in-person conversation, and site visits at TMV’s plant and observe the way
TMS’s employees work.

4. One of the goals of your initiative should focus on improving the customer journey. (300 words)
a. Describe the customer journey you are trying to influence. Include the stages that customers
go through.
b. What are the information needs the customers have at each stage?
c. What are they thinking/feeling/doing at each stage?

Steps Details Information needs of What customer are

customer thinking/feeling/doing
Awareness Customer was aware of the need to The technology that Customer is now
and have some transformation to other companies or thinking about ways of
understand improve productivity of the work subsidiaries are using catching up with other
after benchmarking themselves in work and companies/subsidiaries
with other companies in the same
production.
industries and other subsidiaries in
the same Corporation
Understand Customer really knows what they A list of several Customer is now
have to look for (tools that help options that customer needing an advisor
them improve productivity of can look into who can help them
work) and start searching for with the list
more information of them.
Consider At this stage, customer consider Details on the pros Customer think they
several options that come out and cons of each of will choose the option
after their searching. Consider the option as well as that bring them the
the cost and benefit as well as the calculation on the most benefit in the
the risk of all the options costs and benefits long run
Intent After considering all the pros Customer need very Customer still has
and cons, as well as the cost and details information on some concern over
benefit of all the options, the features of the the deployment plan
customer has had in mind what product, trial of the of the project, how to

4
 they think to be the most product the get every employees
feasible to them deployment plan of ready for the changes
the project
Buy Purchase Order initiated Items ordered should Customer thinks
correctly match whether they get the
customer need best price for the
project
Usage Successful deployment of the Successful testing Customer thinks they
project results and data should closely monitor
migration and control this
process to ensure no
missing or leakage of
data in this step
Advocate Customer has good feedback N/A Customer is really
about the product and share interested in using the
their success story with others product

5. Now, use the customer insights you gathered to think about the pain points and desired goals of
your target audience. Then think about what kinds of content they will find relevant, timely and
useful. Consider the stages in the customer journey and how you can align content to customer
journey stage and intent. (300 words)
a. What content will you use to engage with your customers? (Choose at least two pieces of
content.)
b. Using Professor Sawhney’s storytelling best practices, how will you use storytelling to solve
the customers’ problem?

a. Content to be used to engage with customer:

1. Some more detailed calculations on the benefits that TMV get from using Office 365 will
exceed the costs in the long term. It is quite apparent that moving from on-premises data
storage will cost TMV a significant amount for investing in infrastructure for the upgrade,
a lot of trainings for IT staff and employees to get used to the new systems. However, in
the long run, TMV will get much more benefits from it. Some of the examples are: less
time for an employee with documents work because of many more support tools in excel,
power point, sway, etc. hence reducing the amount of payment that TMV has to give to
employees for overtime work; less expenses for employees’ travelling because of the
usage of Skype, and online sharepoint; more effective fraud prediction and prevention
thank to analytics functions in excel and powerBI.

5
 2. When migrating data to cloud, whether TMV’s data will be leaked to any third party
seems to be the top concern from customer. To clear this concern, it is relevant to show
to customer how Microsoft has put a lot of effort into ensuring the technology that holds
corporate data is secured. Microsoft’s infrastructure is top notch, highly available,
redundant, and patched. If all of these are not true of our own infrastructure, then Office
365 is not more secure than your onsite deployment.

6. Now that you have thought through the customer journey and the engagement strategy you will
use, think about how you will execute the initiative and measure success. (300 words)
a. Which channels do you plan to use to engage with customers?
b. Define three metrics for success of your initiative.
c. How will you use the results you find to be more agile, and make changes to your initiative
as you discover these results?

a. Channels that I plan to use to engage with customer include the following:

1. Event: Invite customer to attend relevant event (Techday) on Modern workplace topic
to know more about Office 365 product. Demo to customers with show cases focusing on
the benefit of using Office 365 in comparison with other versions of Office. In the event,
customer will get chance to communicate with other customers as well as get successful
story sharing from a speaker in the same industry.

2. Office 365 community: Involve my target customer in such group. This should be the
group that I have worked with other users before to create avenues for users of Office
365 to tell their authentic stories. Participants to this group can share and participated in
the stories that matter to them. In this group, I will also highlight the best examples of the
stories for customer’s attention.

3. In-person communication: after using all the channels above, the most important
channel is the in-person communication with customer to know what they are thinking,
feeling or doing. Knowing that I can timely address their concern related to the matters.

b. 3 Metrics to measure the success of my initiatives are:

Customer get interested in Office 365 product and ask for more information of it

Customer ask for trial of the product

Customer buy the product

6