7) How would you change Trap-Ease’s marketing strategy? What kinds of control procedures would you establish for this strategy?
The first thing I would do to change Trap-Ease’s marketing strategy would be to increase the amount of people in their marketing team. Although Martha was probably trying to keep down costs by not hiring anyone for her marketing team she made one important mistake. One of the most important things when coming out with a new product is the marketing because until you’ve communicated the benefits of your product to the consumer there will not be sufficient demand for it. Her entry into the market was too small scale and chances are that with such an innovative product that the company will do better in the long run with a larger scale entry. She should have asked for a larger budget and hired more people for the marketing team. She should have then put much more work into the Analysis of her target markets and perhaps expanded her scope of target markets while increasing the segmentation. This would allow her to better differentiate her product. I would put in operating controls and strategic controls in order to monitor the marketing team’s progress and make sure that what they are doing is consistent with the company’s goals and strategy. These controls would very important for gathering the information that would form the strategies in the coming years. It would also probably help to do a market audit at some point during the first year just to make sure that things are running smoothly and it shouldn't cost that much to do one at such an early stage in the companies development because of the smaller volume of papers to audit.