Entrepreneurship assignment Investigating Marketability of Business Idea

Question

Task

You are supposed to prepare a report on entrepreneurship assignment based on the following scenario:

After finishing your master’s degree at ICMS, you have decided to open a barber shop in Bondi. But before starting the venture, you plan to investigate the marketability of this idea. You have heard about the concept of design thinking to spot and harness opportunities, as well as to develop your business.

• Develop a customer journey map to understand your customer(s) key interactions with your company. The customer journey map should include a written description (justification of each element) and a graphical illustration of the following elements:
• One customer persona
• Purchase journey (a path to purchase divided into specific steps or phases)
• Touchpoints customers will interact with or use during their experience
• Customers’ actions throughout the purchase journey
• Derive and justify 2 specific critical success factors that are relevant for your business to ensure successful competitive performance.
• Derive and justify for each of the two critical success factors one lead (performance) and one related lag (result) indicators to measure the performance.
• Discuss potential limitations for each of the derived lead and lag indicators.
• Discuss how the insights provided by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) can support your decision to open the barber shop.

Answer

Discussion
a) With regards to the present context of entrepreneurship assignment, the consumer journey refers to the amalgamation of different interactions, experiences and touchpoints that the potential consumers possessup until buying – and beyond. In case of B2C, the consumer journey definition tends to also constitute the different complexities of effective decision-makers, touchpoints, budget approval with different units (George and Wakefield, 2018).

Consumer persona – It is general for a brand to utilise segmentation process to comprehend the characteristics of the targeted audience including the socio-economic, demographic and gender status. A consumer persona has helped in attaining a more transparent image of the consumer, including the personal motivations, communication system and brand value (Onel et al., 2018).

Figure 1: Consumer Persona for the Barber shop in Bondi

(Source: Created by the Learner)

Purchase Journey – The “Path to purchase” can be defined a s aconventional concept that has significantly developed over the years due to thee impacts of globalisation and increased technological advancements. The potential consumers move via and back and forth between the different stages, influenced by different factors including online and offline at every individual phase. The initial step of the purchase journey i.e. awareness can be generated from marketing the business via different channels and mediums. During the consideration stage, the significance of the online mediums tend to sustain, with the top platforms for research being online reviews and official website (Rudkowski et al., 2020). In the third stage of conversion, it is the responsibility of the consumer to execute two decisions including when and where to purchase the product. As during the final stage of making the product decision, the element of price can be termed as an essential consideration in this segment. In the final stage of evaluation, it can be said that positive consumer experiences tend to be crucial in generating value and loyalty and also, repeat the purchases. However, the increasing peer reviews and voicing of consumer experiences does have the potential to manipulate the future trends and purchase decisions in positive and negative terms.

Figure 2: Purchase Journey

(Source: Rudkowski et al., 2020)

Touchpoints – A specific touchpoint refers to any type of interaction that tends to change the particular way that the consumers feels about its business or brand. When starting to analyse the consumer journey, the consumer touchpoints prove to be an effective point to start and can be termed as an area where the potential stakeholders are actively engaged with different perspectives on the interaction behavior of the consumers (Heine and Berghaus, 2014). For the representation, kindly refer to Table 1 in the Appendices part.

Consumers actions – The four different phases or activities of the consumer purchase journey includes the importance of the purchase journey, its change over time, optimising the content for the journey and effective marketing with the consumer journey. Within this specific environment, it is important to comprehend that an effective marketing department provides informational content that tend to be significant for consumers at individual step along the journey.

b) The concept of CSF refers to those specific variables important to facilitate a positive result for a specific business strategy or program. The project and the management department work extensively hard to distinguish between the specific variables that tend to correlate with results exerting a general impact. In majority of the situations, the exploration of critical success factors can be termed as the outcome of exploration and extensive research, statistical modelling and informed discussion. The two CSF’s in context of the new entrepreneurial business of a barber shop in Bondi includes increased consumer loyalty and responding to changing needs and demands. These factors are considered to be very much important as the increased consumer loyalty factor is generated from providing exceptional consumer service and influencing the purchase decisions of the consumers. It is also vital for the organisational managers to evaluate and monitor the correlated measures with the CSF’sas the overall process of developing such factors tends to be an iterative procedure that needs intensive refinements and adjustments depending on the real experience (Alias et al., 2014). Due to the change in consumer trend and preferences, the achievement of the critical success factor of responding to altering needs and demands is justifiable as it will help the company to attain the competitive advantages.

c) The identification of the CSF’s will facilitate the new company to evaluate the strategic progress towards accomplishing the aimed goals and ultimately, to paving the way for fulfilling the barber shop’s mission. The concept of lag measures prove to be indicators that tend to evaluate the targeted goals that the organisation strives to accomplish. The application of the lead success factors will enable the company to extensively focus on its development and not the point of destination. Therefore, it can be termed as significant for the organisation to commit to the lead measures. The rate of conversion can be termed as a lag related success factor as it is a result of what the organisation has done to increase the level of sales and here, the conversion rate refers to the approximate percentage of visitors visiting the official website of the barber company. An outcome-based metric like this tend to be easy to evaluate due to efficient accessibility. The primary benefit of evaluating a lag related indicator is the potential to measure progress and if the conversion rate is low, this signifies a after-the-event measurement and this explains that the new entrepreneurial business cannot utilise this specific measurement to change the future sustainability requirements (Badawy et al., 2016).

d) It has also been ascertained from the study that in order to enhance the safety performance of the barber company, it is recommended to utilise an amalgamation of both lead and lag indicators. In order to influence the future scenarios, a different method of evaluation is needed, one that tends to be predictive instead of a result. The measurement of the different marketing activities helps in deriving a set of lead indicators as they tend to be more productive and in-process measures. There are some possible limitations associated with the derived lagging indicators including the sacrifice of the potential pips by the traders waiting for assurance from the specific indicator. Another limitation is that lagging indicators possess no concept or notions of primary levels hence, it is important for the traders to be potentially aware of this as it depends on the trader to execute detailed assessment, with the purpose of stacking the unfavourables in favourability. In case of the leading indicators, the limitation is its budgeted price action that cannot be guaranteed. Therefore, it is important for the entrepreneurs or traders to implement their own level of profiency and knowledge regarding indicators in every complex situation. Additionally, the leading indicators prove to be more insightful in advanced techniques of technical assessment including Ellitt Wave Theory that really proves to be intimidating for budding traders (Pasman and Rogers, 2014).

e) The GEM survey has conventionally commited towards the motivations, attributes, and accomplishment of individuals attempting to implement a entrepreneurial business idea less than 42 months old. The extensive research enable effective support for the perception that potential entrepreneurs can operate within mature companies and compared with other workforce’s, the EEA (Entrepreneurial Employee Activity) associated individuals are more likely to identify the valuable opportunities and capable of establishing a entrepreneurial business, just like the barber shop business in Bondi. The patterns of EEA across the different phases of economic development is hence, the vice versa for the beginning phase independent entrepreneurship. This tends to be aligned with the perception that the increased opportunity costs of independent entrepreneurship facilitates the stimulation of enterprising workers and staffs to actively involve in entrepreneurial behavior within the business (babson.edu, 2020). Therefore, it can be said that the insights gained from this survey will help in assembling all the required resources and execute the entrepreneurial business notion. The significance of entrepreneurship lies in the notion that it is the skills, activities and goals of the individuals that tend to drive the entrepreneurial procedure and national culture. The best thing about GEM is that it screens entrepreneurial business as a constant process instead of depicting as an individual event.

Hence, it can be said that the positive insights gained from assessing the GEM will prove beneficial and impact for making the effective decision to establish a new barber shop.

Reference List
Alias, Z., Zawawi, E.M.A., Yusof, K. and Aris, N.M., 2014. Determining critical success factors of project management practice: A conceptual framework. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 153, pp.61-69.

Badawy, M., Abd El-Aziz, A.A., Idress, A.M., Hefny, H. and Hossam, S., 2016. A survey on exploring key performance indicators. Future Computing and Informatics Journal, 1(1-2), pp.47-52.

George, M. and Wakefield, K.L., 2018. Modeling the consumer journey for membership services. Journal of Services Marketing.

Heine, K. and Berghaus, B., 2014. Luxury goes digital: how to tackle the digital luxury brand–consumer touchpoints. Journal of Global Fashion Marketing, 5(3), pp.223-234.

Onel, N., Mukherjee, A., Kreidler, N.B., Díaz, E.M., Furchheim, P., Gupta, S., Keech, J., Murdock, M.R. and Wang, Q., 2018. Tell me your story and I will tell you who you are: Persona perspective in sustainable consumption. Psychology & Marketing, 35(10), pp.752-765.

Pasman, H. and Rogers, W., 2014. How can we use the information provided by process safety performance indicators? Possibilities and limitations. Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, 30, pp.197-206.

Rudkowski, J., Heney, C., Yu, H., Sedlezky, S. and Gunn, F., 2020. Here Today, Gone Tomorrow? Mapping and modeling the pop-up retail customer journey. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 54.

babson.edu, 2020. ENTREPRENEURIAL EMPLOYEE ACTIVITY: NEW RESEARCH & INSIGHTS FOR MANAGERS* | Babson College. [online] Babson.edu. Available at: [Accessed 18 November 2020].

Appendix

Table 1: Consumer Touchpoints