Week 10: Primary Research + Assignment 1

Our teams progress has been illustrated on a Gantt chart upto this point of the project. Once we have received a response to our email (See last post) we will begin to conduct our primary research which will also be added to this chart.

Week 9: Quals & Quants + Reflective Theory + Assignment 1

We spoke with our unit leader Bex Lewis, she suggested that we email Dawn Melody (MMU contact) suggesting how to creatively market changes to the app based on what could be successful. We also agreed to CC both Bex and Mark in the email. 

This is the email we received from Dawn before hand.

Week 7: Desk based research and Ethics

During this week’s seminar we looked at a TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson which highlights the similarities in the global education systems is the past 50 years. The talks highlights how many employers now see a degree as a benchmark of education and will no longer 'guarantee' you a job. The talks also highlight that all compulsory education put the subjects of Mathematics and Science as the most impotent subjects often giving subjects such as Dance and Drama a backseat. As a team we are able to use this information in order to market towards people who maybe didn't get the chance to study a subject that they were passionate about in school or college.

We intend to use this information to our advantage as the Application can use experiences from recent graduates and current students to re-engage with universities and the experiences that they have to offer. We also want the app to highlight what kind of societies the university has to offer as we believe that this will be more appealing to prospective students.

Ken Robinson' TED Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

Week 6: Group work and Feedback

After meeting with the client we decided to speak to Study Bundles contact at MMU. After emailing the relevant staff of the University that the client had spoken to previously regarding the CampusConnect app and not receiving a response we have emailed the client to request another meeting. The aim of the next meeting will be to discuss competitor research we have conducted and to contact the university staff via the client to attempt to secure a meeting.

Also competed ethics checklist and other ethical documents to ensure our market research falls within MMU's ethical code.

Week 5: Project management

Peter and Sulayman met with the client, Daniel, one of the directors at Studybundles. During the meeting they talked about the brands current penetration into the market and the main obstacles that the brand is facing while trying to attract clients. They also discussed about how when Daniel met with MMU about the app to which they were skeptical as they had already tried to create a similar app that ended up failing. We have decided that the best plan for the coming weeks is to speak to the same MMU staff that our client spoke to in order to see why the original MMU app was not successful and distinguish the differences between the 2 apps and conduct research into Studybundles main competitors which are Hobson and Gecko Labs.

Week 4: Clarifying the Brief

We have now been given a project that we will be working on throughout the big agency unit. Our client, Studybundles is based in Chester street in Manchester and also have offices in Northern Ireland. Our client is looking to expand their client base for a higher education prospectus 'application' which aims to simplify the process of looking into different HE institutions for potential students. during the start of our endeavor we have decided to research our client’s competitors and also look at the impact that Studybundles has had on the marketplace up to this point in time. We will then conduct further market research looking at the opinions of existing students in the UK and internationally in order to understand what the general thought of the app is; we will use the data that we collect in order to give constructive feedback to our client.

The Big Agency Week 3

Unfortunately i sis not attend this seminar due to illness.

Week 2: Team Forming and Role Theory

In our second week of The Big Agency we recapped what we had learned in week one and started to look at Belbin’s team roles and SWOT Analysis. We looked at theories from Tuckman (1965) and Hersey and Blanchard’s situation leadership model (1977). Another model that we looked at was Katzenbach and Smith (1993).

Later in the seminar we all took a test to see which Belbin team role we best suited, I was personally given the coordinator role.

Finally, we looked at pitching tips and over the course of the week created a 5 min presentation to decide which of the projects we wanted to work on.

Week 1: Motivation

In our first lesson we were introduced to the unit. We also learned about motivational theories such as:

• ·         Satisfaction Theories
• ·         Incentive Theories
• ·         Intrinsic Theories
• ·         Two factor theory

There are many motivators in the workplace, Fredrick Herzberg identified some of these as

• ·         Interesting Work
• ·         Challenging Work
• ·         Opportunities for achievement
• ·         Recognition
• ·         Responsibility
• ·         Advancement
• ·         Personal Growth

Douglas McGregor had a theory that there are two types of managers, X and Y and this will influence the way that you attempt to motivate people.