End of the Second Term is Approaching -- Work, work and more work

It has been a punishing March, with me taking three classes simultaneously: B2B marketing (the way companies market themselves when dealing with businesses as customers), services management (the strategic management of services), and corporate control (strategies that firms can take when deciding on their capital structure).

I spent maybe 15 hours this weekend on a B2B paper on Rakuten, perhaps the #1 online shopping site in Japan. If I wanted to I could have blown off this work until next week (the due date is actually the first week of April), but I wanted to put a good effort into it and ended up presenting it as sort of a case study: "how Rakuten provides value to its merchant (business) customers." Well, that wasn't exactly the title, but it was the way that I tried to depict Rakuten's value proposition to its (business) customers. Rakuten's easy-to-use customer interface (for those buying products and services from companies and travel service providers registered on Rakuten) certainly makes it an attractive target (Rakuten provides strong competition to amazon in Japan), but its activities supporting the companies who register on their site are also crucial key success factors.

From tomorrow (Monday) we start another four-day simulation game: Innovation Marketing. I'm not sure how it will work out, but there will be crazy deadlines and we'll have all sorts of deliverables to turn in. At the end of it we'll all be drained, as we usually are. Have to pace myself or I'm going to wipe myself out before next Monday's tests in finance (not one, but two!)