Tis the season of when greeting card companies make a lot of their $$ each year, so we will do a greeting card case study!
Your expectations:
1) Clearly define the problem.
2) Incorporate these traits:
One’s strengths relative to the business: taking care of or improving work by its deadline, asking a question or providing an answer for a discussion’s contribution, and creating a model of a project to get a clearer picture about its result or a goal
One’s weaknesses relative to the business: not staying at the top of an important matter, input that can’t produce an output, and incapacity of managing a large project independently
One’s opportunities relative to the business: self-managing, leading, and working with a group of colleagues
One’s threats relative to the business: web surfing, watching movies, and playing video games
3) Incorporate the Drucker decision-making process:
Define the generic PROBLEM
Establish financial BOUNDARY CONDITIONS
Come up with a SOLUTION that will satisfy the boundary conditions
Create an action PLAN to implement the solution within a year
Choose a measure that will provide FEEDBACK
An example of the Drucker decision-making process:
Problem: revenue is a vital monetary resource to develop something.
Boundaries: a first boundary (high risk) is to minimize investing money, and a second boundary (low risk) is to maximize advertising
Solution: use a cutting-edge solution to develop the revenue given the boundaries.
Plan: develop the cutting-edge solution to create revenue within a year.
Feedback: collect feedback from professionals to solve the cutting-edge solution.
4) Make a clear recommendation
5) Show how you think and how you prioritize
6) Here’s the greeting card case study:
As part of an industry with generous profit margins and high barriers to entry, American Greetings had spent decades in a comfortable position. Beginning at the turn of the 20th century, it had helped to create a mass market for the greeting card and had presided over its growth into a multi-billion-dollar industry. Because the manufacturing of cards—especially those with special designs or attachments—could be complex, and because customers were used to choosing from a large selection of cards, it was difficult for new players to offer the big, established card companies any serious competition.
By the end of the 20th century, American Greetings was the second-largest greeting card company in the world, after Hallmark, and had bought out several of its lesser competitors. It had expanded its expertise to become a major manufacturer of gift wrap, party goods, stationery, calendars, and other “social expression” products. And it had also been successful as the creator of licensed characters such as Holly Hobbie, Strawberry Shortcake, and Care Bears. But the core of its business remained the profitable greeting card. As senior vice president and executive supply chain officer Michael Goulder put it, “The average card has 25 to 40 cents of variable cost in it, we wholesale it for a buck or so, and the retailer sells it for $3.00. What a wonderful industry!”
However, by the late 1990s, the business had become more challenging. Growth in greeting card sales stagnated, and existing customers began to turn to online cards. At the same time, the company began to experience pressure from retailers who wanted an increasingly larger share of the healthy margins. Greeting cards were still a wonderful industry, but there were worries about the future.
7) Imagine that you’re at the helm of American Greetings during this transition period. How do you decide what to do? Where do you steer the ship?
8) The persuasive essay must be up 3 pages or up to 825 words