| dc.description.abstract | This internship report is written by an ongoing full-time employee of Grumpy Coffee
Marketing, holding the position of Executive, Market Research and Campaign Execution,
whose main responsibilities entail performing a wide range of research and consulting tasks
and coordinating in-the-field activities. The organization is a research-driven marketing
agency, which offers a wide range of research, consulting, and marketing solutions to its
clientele. The time spent so far with the organization has helped the employee gain exposure
to a wide range of industries, hone their range of soft and hard skills, and expanded the
employee’s professional network.
The marketing agency landscape of Bangladesh is dominated by agencies which offer little in
the way of research and consumer insights, with a small number offering digital quantitative
insights and the rest offering none whatsoever. On the other hand, there are some dedicated
research and consulting firms, but they are prohibitively expensive for most businesses and do
not offer any marketing solutions. Grumpy Coffee Marketing, having started its journey in mid-
2020, aims to serve this gap in the market by offering research and consulting services along
with marketing solutions driven by its own research at an accessible price point. The services
the firm offers range from distribution chain analysis, retail audits, and consumer journey
mapping to digital marketing, campaign execution, and brand identity development.
The organization is a partnership firm with a very low power distance culture and a laissez faire
leadership style, with employees receiving very little micromanagement. The firm’s employees
generally take ownership of their assigned work, quickly learn to tackle problems critically,
and are given a lot of decision-making headroom. Given such an organizational culture, the
firm practices headhunting when recruiting employees to ensure a proper organizational fit.
Much emphasis is also given on the training and development of employees in order to achieve business objectives, with the firm offering access to online courses, and the partners of the firm
providing on-the-job training and mentoring.
The firm’s business level strategy is an amalgamation of Umbrella Strategy and Process
Strategy, both of which are variants of Emergent Strategy (Mintzberg & Waters, 1985), and its
marketing strategy is an Umbrella Strategy. In terms of generic strategies (Porter, 1980), its
marketing strategy is a Differentiation Strategy, with the firm’s USP being that it serves as a
one-stop solution for both qualitative and quantitative research driven marketing, where
actionable insights and the actions themselves can be sought from the same provider. The
firm’s target clients are brands which believe in research-driven marketing, have an interesting
marketing problem to solve, and do not engage in unethical business practices. Currently, the
firm is undergoing a rebranding initiative, and as such its own promotional activities are
temporarily suspended.
In terms of financial performance, the firm seems to be doing well, but not much financial
analysis is possible, as the firm currently has yet to complete even two full years of operations,
with only one year’s financial statements being present at the time of this report’s preparation.
Furthermore, comparative data is also not available as the firm operates in an industry where
relevant competitors are not publicly traded companies.
Given that the firm is small in size and sells highly customizable professional services, there
does not exist much in terms of operations management. Its reliance on information systems is
generally limited to various communication platforms, project management tools, online
document editors, a suite of creative and design softwares, and a number of data analytics tools.
Since the firm operates in a cross section of the marketing and research industries, it faces a
higher-than-moderate overall competitive landscape, with only the threat of direct competitors
being very low because of its unique positioning, while almost every other competitive force being high or very high. The firm’s biggest strength is that it offers marketing services based
on actionable insights gained from research work that it itself performs, driven by close
collaboration between its research and creative content teams, with its biggest weakness being
its small company size. Its biggest opportunity is its first mover advantage, and its biggest
threat is the threat of other agencies in Bangladesh starting to offer research-driven marketing
solutions. Recommendations for the firm are to increase its employee headcount, and to
accelerate its ongoing rebranding initiative.
The project section of this report explores the effects of store cleanliness and POSM (Point of
Sales Materials) branding on revenue generation through the lens of a project conducted with
a client of Grumpy Coffee Marketing in the context of the furniture industry. Qualitative
observations of multiple retail stores were made before and after improvements were made in
store cleanliness and POSM branding, and then validated against quantitative monthly revenue
figures from each retail store. The findings suggest that there is a significant positive
relationship between store cleanliness and POSM branding and the generation of revenue.
These findings have implications for both the client and the furniture industry as a whole, while
also opening up areas for future researchers to evaluate the effects of store cleanliness and
POSM branding as independent factors, and their relevance in other industries. | en_US |
