Combined Marketing/Operations Question
For this assignment, you are asked to consider the organisation that you work for, or one that you are very familiar with. ( I suggest to use Mcdonald)
Prepare a brief introduction for this assessment to identify your chosen organisation – see ‘Note’ (1) below on page 3 for further guidance.
I have attached a power point presentation for use at least 1 chart for describe quality for mcdonald or a part or marketing.
Assignment Task:
“Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay for only what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.” (Peter F. Drucker)
Critically analyse the premise of this quote in relation to your chosen organisation’s strategies for managing and improving quality (whether this is product and/or service quality). You need to examine from both a marketing and operations perspective. Some areas that you might consider, but you are not limited to, include:
• How does your chosen organisation and its customers view quality? Compare / contrast the key criteria that each focuses on. Consider the implications (positive / negative) of any similarities and / or differences in viewpoint.
• How does your chosen organisation ensure conformance to quality standards? What processes / systems are in place to measure and monitor this? What improvements can be made to these processes / systems?
• Examine the extent to which operations and marketing work together to consider the impact of quality problems on the company and its customers. Consider if there are any conflicts / challenges that occur between the two functions. How have these conflicts / challenges been overcome (or can be overcome)?
NOTE:
(1) You are required to write concisely to transmit your analysis. The introduction should be no more than 200 words and should clearly and concisely set the context for your answer to Part B.
(2) Set a minimum of 6 academic references in addition to the core course textbooks (i.e. Kotler, Keller & Chernev and Slack, Brandon-Jones & Burgess) to support your answer.
(3) Make sure that you use clear and relevant examples to illustrate both marketing and operations elements.
General advice:
don’t try to look at too many areas. You need to decide what might a suitable scope for your essay – it needs to be focused enough to be manageable but broad enough to give you enough content to write about. Also, ensure that the scope of your analysis is made clear upfront in your introduction.
Choice of organisation: you may then choose to focus on a particular product / business unit / customer market (B2B or B2C). The main criteria is that you have access to sufficient information from both a marketing and an operations perspective within that organisation in order to fully answer the question set for the essay
Critical analysis: it is important that you ensure that you’re not just describing the various marketing and operations activities or just describing the theory. You need to think about the theory (models /frameworks) that are relevant for the focus of your examination and then applying them in context – therefore, you need to think about what will be relevant to help to structure and support the specific focus of your examination. Again, don’t use too many models / frameworks – otherwise you will find it difficult to be able to examine in-depth.
Linking theory with practice is important and it’s up to you to select relevant organisational information/examples to demonstrate your understanding of the different perspectives of the theories and your ability to apply them effectively and critically. Don’t forget that you need to be able to draw on both marketing and operations management theory to support your examination and the marker will be looking for a balanced focus on marketing and operations so don’t give undue weighting to one over the other – try to provide equal consideration to both marketing and operations.
Providing a ‘Conclusion’: In part B, in terms of structure, we would expect a conclusion to bring the assignment’s main points together, but keep it brief – a couple of sentences will be sufficient.
