Management Paper Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Management Paper - Assignment Example In the week four paper I identified several strategies that Auxilium Pharmaceutical could pursue. The purpose of this paper is to prepare an implementation plan for the company. A complete financial breakdown of the budget to implement the plan by segment is illustrated in Appendix A. The company must build up the image of the company and reinforce its brand value across the domestic United States marketplace. The company needs the doctors to recognize the firm’s brands as one of the best alternatives to treat Dupuytren’s contracture and hypogonadism. The company must hire a temporary workforce of pharmaceutical sales representatives for a period of six months. Each state will be allocated 100 pharmaceutical sales representatives. The goal of the program is for the pharmaceutical sales representatives to visit the offices of every doctor in the United States and to give them several samples of both drugs. As of 2008 there were 661,400 doctors in the United States (Bls, 2011). The purpose of the initiative is to create brand awareness of the firm’s products and to provide a personalized customer service to the doctors that prescribe the drugs. The cost to implement the plan is illustrated below: total employees 5000 Total hours elapse (6m) 1039 Total man hours 5,195,000 Labor cost per hour $15 Project cost $77,925,000 After the completion of the six months the company will not have to pay anymore the pharmaceutical sales representatives because their contracts will end and the company will no longer need their services. Due to the high implementation costs of the plan the company could divide the visiting doctor project in two years. The project after six months or lower and $38 million in spending would become inactive. The following fiscal year the company would fund the additional $38 million to complete the project. The company will also target the end user of the medicine, the patient. The company must increase its marketing budget a lo t in 2012. The firm’s marketing budget must be at least twice of its 2010 spending. An effective branding strategy requires a high capital investment. The firm should create a new advertising campaign to be launched on Christmas day. The commercial will be launched simultaneously on the written press, television, radio, and the internet. The written press commercial will be a reanimation of the commercial in cartoon format. The radio commercial will provide the same audio as the television commercial. The television and internet commercial are identical. The total elapse time of the commercial will be 15 seconds. The advertising campaign will be run on television and radio for 30 days. The written press will have the commercial on for a period of 30 days with an offering of the commercial once a week. The internet campaigns will be ran for 90 days. The reason the internet campaign will be run longer is due to the lower cost of internet commercials. The total budget for the pr oject is $2,000,000 million. The organization will use additional campaigns in order to raise the brand value of the firm. One of the technological tools that will be used to target specific customer profiles is the use of cellular technology advertisement. One of the advantages of cellular advertisement is that the entire population of targeted customers receives the message into their phones simultaneously. Due to the graphic and online capabilities of smartphones the company could design very appealing commercials. The commercial length should not exceed 15

Consider the product level models of New Product Development Essay

Consider the product level models of New Product Development - Essay Example These factors make the approach to new product development a critical one (Ribbens, 2000, p. 1). The process thus requires management support; it must also benefit from the experience of new product development teams composed of people from all affected activities; it has to follow distinct phases with extremely well defined activities in order to enhance understanding, greater accuracy and reduce risks and failures that are eminent in new product development. Key elements in new product development The process of new product development takes into consideration seven distinct elements, stages or phases. The first element is idea generation. This is the most critical aspect of all the elements in new product development because without idea generation it is difficult to come up with new products. Here ideas are gathered which present possible product options. Many companies conduct idea generation as a continuous process with contributions from within the organization and outside the organization. A number of methods are used and these may include focus group discussions with consumers, comments suggestions and feedback from customers and research from secondary sources. Creative problem solving technique such as brainstorming is used in this case that enables creative minds to come up with new ideas about an existing problem or a gap in the market. In the brainstorming session, first individuals are told about the problem as a creative challenge. This is important in order to come up with ideas that are viable for a new product. After this, people are given a time limit to think and come up with ideas. When the session begins, the people voice out their ideas and the facilitator lists them down with no criticism made. The best ideas are selected by the facilitator and which all group members agree with. The ideas are then evaluated on a scoring criteria and the idea with the highest score becomes the solution to the problem. Another model, the creative problem solving process model advanced by Osborn-Parnes can also be used here if a feasibility analysis has been carried out to identify problems upon which ideas are generated and solutions sought (Blythe, 2006, p. 50). The model is composed of six stages that can be compressed into three with distinct activities at each of these stages. They include: exploring the challenge which involves identifying the goal, gathering relevant data and clarifying the problem at hand; generating ideas involves coming up with options to solve the problem; and preparing for action which involves solution finding and preparing a plan for action. The process is lauded for its involvement of convergent and divergent thinking that can be used at each of these three stages. The second element is screening and this involves the careful and critical evaluations of the options presented by the new product development team to isolate the best idea or attractive options. This could be done in rounds depending on th e number of ideas and may also involve a number of techniques. As the ideas are being evaluated, other considerations are also made in terms of potential sales, the costs of production, profitability, competition. Only the accepted ideas