Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

Trusha,

Your thesis topic should be on something you find interesting and would like to explore and learn more about. Something you have niggling in the back of your mind that you have observed and would like to prove (or disprove), carry forward, or combine with something else to come up with a new concept. The reason you want something you are interested in is that you will be married to this topic day and night for a long time and you better enjoy it! your interest should drive you forward to complete all the hard work.

So, given that, what about marketing interests you? Which theories and writings about brand management do you enjoy? You mentioned that others have given you ideas you didn't want to do - what where they and why did you not like them? This would helps us narrow the scope down for you versus just throw out a bunch of random thoughts that interest us. Let's have a dialog here.

I hope this helps.

Wayde

Trusha,

Your thoughts are very good. Why you want to avoid quant research, I don't understand. If it is because you are not strong there, then maybe it should be a part of your thesis to strengthen your skills there. This is a valuable skill to have in your toolbox as a professional marketer. Certainly you can get by without quant research, but it makes the decisions your work supports riskier - based on gut feel versus quantitative analysis. If your concern is in gathering the quant data, I would guess your company has a wealth of quant data available to you that you might be able to use.

But, that set aside: A case study of a brand is a good thesis as long as you incorporate theory into the case. Like, what theories and principles of marketing were incorporated and what went right and what went wrong and why. Also, what theories and principles were overlooked, why, and what might have been improved had the theories and principles been introduced into the process. You might also discuss continuous improvement principles - how you can make your brand management process better by incorporating certain theories.

For the kid's brand, instead of the tired old ethical question of advertisements toward kids, you could create a compilation of good practices and bad practices with some theory behind why the good practices are acceptable and then how they can be utilized to promote the brand successfully.

For the health message idea, you could examine at what point health messages in ads becomes commoditized and ignored or expected so that everyone has to use it but basically meaningless otherwise today. following these thoughts, you could decide if reformulating to allow use of "health messages" like "lite," "low fat," and "no sugar added" have a payback. Do you gain (or prevent loss of) market share in significance to pay for the R&D, repackaging, advertisement, and launch?

These are my thoughts. Whether they are interesting to you or not, perhaps they will stimulate more thought by you to find a suitable topic.

Wayde

Trusha,

For the kid's advertising case, you could have a title similar to:
Ethical and Effective Practices for Advertising to Children
The framework would discuss the current ethical issues concerning advertising to children, efforts and regulations in force and under way, the protests from parents and children's rights groups, and then guidelines for "staying out of trouble." Then, you could discuss what can't be done within these guidelines and then what can. For those items that can be done, you can discuss (for each) best marketing practices with theoretical backup as to what can be expected for return on these kinds of practices. You can also touch on the changes to brand strategy that these practices would involve.

For the health issue, the title could be:
Payback Analysis in Introduction of Health-Targeted Brand Extensions"
This topic is a bit more quantitative. You'd be looking at sales and share numbers for healthy spin-off brands versus the estimated cost of formulation and launch and also looking at these same data for brand extensions not related to health-targeting. Your hypotheses would be: H0: Health-targeted brand extensions result in lower paybacks compared to other brand extensions; H1: Paybacks for health-targeted brand extensions are no different than any brand extension.

The statistics involved here are fairly straight forward - but, as I said, there are some quant parts for this.

Wayde