Marketing case study analysis and strategic recommendations

Bob Waters is a successful sales engineer at Omni Automated Systems, who aims to make an important sale to Gentech. Since Gentech is currently developing its automated capacity, this would ensure Omni consistent revenues over the next period of time and a profitable business relationship. Although Waters makes significant efforts over a year, in the end, a different company is chosen. This analysis will look at several problems, and will propose a couple of solutions to address these.

The main problem is the organizational culture at Gentech. Organizational culture is seen, by Kennedy and Deal (1982) as "the way things get done around here." The problem with Gentech is that, throughout the case study, Waters is not able to figure out how things are done there, particularly who makes decisions. In appearance, this seems pretty clear and is openly and transparently, but decisions on most things (from specs to the final purchasing decision) appear to move from one decision maker to another. Officially, there is a committee that makes the final call, but one could always whether Kevin Reilly, vice president for northern California operations, is not in fact the final decision maker.

Another problem is the fact that Omni appears to have some problems on the technical and service side, as the meetings between Waters and the foreman point out. While Waters boasts, in his marketing and communication message, that "price, reliability, and throughput" are the main competitive advantages for Omni (something that will be included in the proposal as well), the foreman tells him that service is late and Waters himself confesses that "upgrade kits were usually developed only for the more recent model year machines." These actual facts do not seem to be in agreement with the message Waters communicates.

Another potential problem is that part of the marketing strategy that Waters uses is to badmouth the competition. His meeting with the foreman on September 16 is focused on providing information about the problems in the programming environments at competitors UA and IAS rather than providing reasonable explanations for the programming problems, resulting in bugs, at Omni. While there is still debate whether badmouthing the competition could be a way to increase sales or not, there seems to be a general agreement that it is better to present the company's benefits as a way to boost sales (Fenn, 2013). In Omni's case, it just seems a way to protect the obvious flaws that the company has in some of its technical areas, previously discussed, then to fix these.

An additional problem is the fact that Omni is not referred to in the specialized literature as an important player in the field, something that cannot be seen as something positive by a future company. Certainly, Waters points out that Omni is a leader, in fact, in a niche market of the robotics field, but this does not seemed properly popularized in specialized literature.

When it comes to the proposed solutions, these are less alternative solutions and more complementary ones: Omni should like implement all of these, since they address different aspects of the main problem, which is the fact that Omni did not win the deal. The first thing to do is to better understand the organizational culture at Gentech. According to the model proposed by Handy (1976), this appears to be a task culture, where the problem to be solved in this case is the acquisition of a new robotics system. Following Kennedy and Deal, however, this is also a process culture: bureaucratic, slow, with low risk etc.

With this in mind, perhaps the approach that Waters took to bombard the different people with information is not necessarily the right one. He appears to have access only to mid-managerial level, such as Thompson. Perhaps he should have his boss (or another vice presidential level employee of Omni) meet with Reilly to understand what matters most for the potential client. He uses a standard, not customized approach: providing information, communication will all he believes play a role etc. He should take things to another level and have his vice president meet with Gentech's vice president.

Second, Omni seems to have some structural technical problems that will not go away even with good marketing. These problems have been shown by the foreman and it could be the case that the management and decision makers at Gentech are also aware of these issues. The best solution here is to address these problems. However, in case this is not possible, the best approach is likely an open and transparent discussions in which these problems are presented, along with the measures that Omni is undertaking in order to reduce or minimize their impact.