TMC Case Study Guidelines
Situation: This section describes the market challenge that you were trying to address in this case – the problem to be solved. It is best not to name your company. In your first reference to the company use an industry segment descriptor like “a supplier of factory automation systems,” or “a maker of instrumentation for materials scientists” Then, throughout the case, refer to your (past or current) employer as “the Company.” You should select a case that occurred at least one year in the past so that you are less likely to disclose confidential information, and so that there are business results and lessons learned that you can report.
How MTP Concepts Apply: This section is to identify which concepts from the Caltech IRC Strategic Marketing of Technology Products (MTP) course you thought might be useful in attempting to address the Situation, and why you thought these concepts might help. Concepts that you might cite include “technology adoption curve” or “whole product” or “augmented product” or “offensive competitive strategy” or “opinion leader”, and so forth. You do not need to explicitly define these terms because the site includes a TMC Vocabulary. Assume you are addressing professional peers from sales, engineering and marketing that have taken the Caltech class.
Strategy: This section covers how you applied strategic marketing concepts and the resulting choices the team made regarding focus market segments, target accounts, competitive strategy, vector of differentiation, product platform and so on. Be sure to discuss any differences in team or management points of view and how you resolved these to create consensus. This section is also an excellent point for you to include conceptual graphics that show how you took a general tool from the course and tailored that tool to help your business team analyze the environment, make decisions, or put a plan in place.
