THE SECOND YEAR SCENE : GMSC SERIES – Collecting Data
Each spring semester 42 full-time Goizueta Business School students participate in the Management Practice elective, Goizueta Marketing Strategy Consultancy (GMSC). GMSC pairs student teams with corporate clients to solve pressing business challenges. The course culminates in a case competition judged by marketing and consulting leaders from across the country. The course is taught by Dr. Reshma H. Shah, Assistant Professor in the area of Marketing. This is the third post in a series about the experiential learning experience at Goizueta from one of the six team’s perspective about conducting research and collecting data.
After spending the time to accurately define, scope, and structure the problem central to our engagement, we are able to proceed with a clear idea of what we are trying to solve for our client. Over the course of a two week period, we focused on collecting the data we need to offer strong, actionable insights to our client.
To put some structure around our data collection efforts, we created a Research Work Plan that linked the issues that arose from our problem structuring sessions to specific questions and potential data sources in order to understand how to get the right information to solve the key client question. Once we had an idea of what needed to be asked to what types of people, we leveraged our client’s resources as well as the Goizueta network to set-up interviews with industry, subject matter, and functional experts.
Our interview sessions have greatly aided our understanding of the problem as well as the greater environment within which our product operates. We have met with top experts who have not only given us insight into the task at hand but enriched our understanding of high-level marketing strategy that can be applied across industries. It has certainly been a challenging couple of weeks but it is clear that the more data we collect the greater our knowledge of the situation grows and the base we have to build out and support our recommendations becomes stronger.
