Marketing Management is Simply Management

This week one of the tasks given us was to widen the scope of our blog posts to encompass the entire volume of information presented this week.

As I was trying to assimilate all the information I realized that I naturally compare each new concept to what I currently do here at Eastman or what I did while serving in the Navy.  That is how I wrote my blog last week and I think that works best for me.

This week I would like to honor Vice Admiral Wilkinson who died this week at age 94.  He was the first commanding officer of the first nuclear powered ship, USS Nautilus, a submarine.  I heard his famous massage repeated many time “Underway on nuclear power” (Wilkinson, Jan 17, 1955).  So I will be comparing what I learned this week to the many lessons I learned serving in the nuclear navy.

I guess I will try to put this in a logical order.  Starting this analogy in the engine room of a nuclear powered aircraft carrier the product being produced is steam.  There are two of these engine rooms producing steam to satisfy the needs of the customers.  The customers are the air department which needs steam to launch planes, the navigation department which needs steam to push the ship through the water, the supply department which needs steam for hotel services (cooking food, washing laundry, heating showers, etc).  The department making the steam had goals associated with supplying their customers with the quality (dry superheated) and quantity (always available) steam.  From these goals the department developed a strategy and then started planning.  We created a long range plan and short range plan based on this strategy.  We also use forecasting to determine at what power level we would have to run in order to ensure we could meet our market demand.  We did this forecasting for long range be ships underway schedule ( how fast we would go to get on station) and for short term by the weekly and daily flight schedules.  We had a seasonal component driven by multiple internal and external factors.  Those factors included training or combat missions and actual time of the year (winter in Afghanistan is cold and combat slows).  Our forecast levels were also dictated by regulatory issues, we had required maintenance and training times that we would require us to have one production facility (engine room) shut down.  We also had regulatory rules which limited certain operations based on distance from land.  All of these factors had to be understood in order to forecast and then plan production to meet market need. 

We had metrics as well which measured customer satisfaction.  These metrics were both in-process and results oriented.  The results metrics tracked numbers of air craft launches missed compared to total number of launches.  We also tracked number of miles steamed.  In-process metrics tracked steam quality and amount of reactor life used.  The amount of reactor life use was the margin measurement for us.

On a bigger scale operating this ship played into the navy’s marketing strategy to maintain budgetary dollars from congress.  There are only so many military missions (markets).   For example surveillance,    air support, troop delivery, etc and each service competes for market share to justify their budget.  We had to know are competitors (other services).  I cannot say that we tracked Net Marketing Contribution, but we did track the total number of missions and the percent share of those missions that the navy received.   Understanding this relationship drives innovation, for example look at the navy’s latest news release.

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/07/10/in-historic-first-navy-lands-unmanned-drone-on-aircraft-carrier/

I understand that we are studying marketing management but my take away thus far is that we just studying management through the marketing lens and that the same fundamentals of management I have used for twenty plus years still apply.