MNG91002 – Entrepreneurship and Marketing
Paper Details
This assignment should be 100% free from plagiarism. Please see the attach files for this assignment. This assignment is based on GoPro case study. All questions in this assignment are based on this case tudy. Questions are divided into two parts like entrepreneurship and marketing. The answers should be based on the Case study. Please follow the all instructions which are available in the attachment files in this assignment.
MNG91002 – Entrepreneurship and Marketing
Aim
The following questions are all based on the GoPro case study published in the Forbes Magazine. Basing your
arguments on the topics that you have studied throughout the unit, write a report addressing all of the
following questions. The report/questions will cover both aspects of the unit.
Assignment structure and marking allocation
Part A
Entrepreneurship (25 marks)
Question 1: Entrepreneurs have been identified as having certain traits and characteristics. Discuss the extent
to which GoPro founder Nick Woodman exemplifies these traits and characteristics. Justify your response with
reference to academic sources (e.g. academic journal articles, textbooks, etc.). (10 marks)
Question 2: Peter Drucker, a leading scholar in the fields of entrepreneurship and marketing, is cited in your
unit material numerous times. When speaking of entrepreneurship, Drucker once stated: ‘Most of what you
hear about entrepreneurship is all wrong. It’s not magic; it’s not mysterious; and it has nothing to do with
genes. It’s a discipline and like any discipline it can be learnt’.
What evidence exists in the GoPro case study that supports and/or refutes this statement Ensure your
argument(s) are developed through direct reference to concepts, tools and techniques evident in the unit
material. (15 marks)
Part B
Marketing and Strategic Planning (60 marks)
The role of planning within the firm has been discussed at length in this unit. We introduced aspects of
entrepreneurial planning and explored how marketing planning gives direction to both corporate planning and
marketing management.
Question 1: How did GoPro gain a competitive advantage from their marketing processes Provide a
theoretical analysis of the reasons for the achievement of this advantage. (30 marks)
Page 2 of 2
Question 2: The GoPro case study specifically identifies future threats to the company’s strategy. Provide a
theoretical analysis of this threat scenario and give recommendations on how GoPro should respond to this.
(30 marks)
Academic rigour (15 marks)
This is a substantial piece of scholarly work and will require extensive engagement with both unit theory and
the case study.
• Your arguments have to be based on concepts and tools discussed in the first 5 topics of this unit and must
be supported through direct reference to academic literature (academic journal articles, academic books,
etc.). Your report will be assessed based on your ability to develop and argument supported by academic
sources (please also refer to marking criteria). Therefore, newspapers, magazines, website opinion pages or
Websites like Wikipedia etc. are certainly not acceptable as foundation for your arguments. All sources
must be properly referenced.
• However, you are encouraged to undertake further research on GoPro to gain a deeper understanding of
the case (e.g. financials, company vision and mission statements, investor relations, etc.). The GoPro
website and other trustworthy non-academic sources are acceptable in this context and this context only. If
you use further information for the case study, make sure you reference your sources correctly. If you are
unsure whether your sources are appropriate, seek your tutor’s advice.
• Assignments strictly have to be within the word limit (- / + 10 %)
School extension policy
Students wanting an extension must make a request at least 24 hours before the assessment item is due and
the request must be received in writing by the unit assessor or designated academic.
Extensions within 24 hours of submission or following the submission deadline will not be granted (unless
supported by a doctor’s certificate or where there are exceptional circumstances – this will be at unit
assessor’s discretion and will be considered on a case by case basis). Extensions will be for a maximum of 48
hours (longer extensions supported by a doctor’s certificate or exceptional circumstances to be considered on
a case by case basis).
A penalty of 10% of the total available grade will accrue for each 24 hour period that an assessment item is
submitted late. Therefore an assessment item worth 20 marks will have 2 marks deducted for every 24 hour
period and at the end of 10 days will receive 0 marks.
Extensions will NOT be approved because of problems with personal computers or storage devices. Back up
your work every day to a secure location.
The Mad Billionaire Behind GoPro: The World’s Hottest Camera Company – Forbes 22/10/2014 21:45
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2013/03/04/the-mad-billionaire-behind-gopro-the-worlds-hottest-camera-company/print/ Page 1 of 8
http://onforb.es/XEDJGn
FORBES 3/04/2013 @ 6:59AM 433,416 views
The Mad Billionaire Behind
GoPro: The World’s Hottest
Camera Company
This story appears in the March 25, 2013 issue of Forbes.
Comment Now
GoPro founder and CEO Nick Woodman poses with his signature camera. (Photo: Eric Millette for Forbes)
Nick Woodman is 37 years old. His constantly tousled sepia hair and
permanent, mischievous half-grin make him look 27. And he acts 17, as I learn
30,000 feet above the Rocky Mountains, after Woodman packed me, his wife,
Jill, and a dozen of his favorite colleagues and buds into a chartered
Gulfstream III en route to Montana’s Yellowstone Club, the most exclusive ski
hill in the U.S.
Already hopped up on Red Bull, tempered by a liter of coconut water,
Woodman darts about the cabin, occasionally breaking conversation to
unleash his trademark excited wail that friends liken to a foghorn.
“YEEEEEEEEEEEEEOW.” A flight attendant emerges with breakfast on a
Ryan Mac Forbes Staff
I cover technology and billionaires for the rest of the 99.9999999%.
The Mad Billionaire Behind GoPro: The World’s Hottest Camera Company – Forbes 22/10/2014 21:45
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silver platter. “You know what the best thing about morning ski trips are ” he
asks the cabin rhetorically. “McDonald’s!” And with that he inhales a
McGriddle in all of three bites.
The man-teen routine is more than an act: It’s the recipe for how he’s become
one of America’s newest and youngest billionaires. A decade ago Woodman
craved a camera he could strap to his wrist so that his buddies could see his
surfing exploits. The result is now a consumer phenomenon called GoPro,
America’s fastest-growing digital imaging company.
Go anywhere active these days, whether it’s the mountains of Vail or the
scuba-diving depths of Honolulu’s Hanauma Bay, and you’re bound to see a
GoPro or 20. Kids these days don’t film their wave rides or half-pipe tricks.
They GoPro them, strapping the $200 to $400 cameras to helmets,
handlebars and surfboards. The cinema-grade, panoramic “point-of-view”
footage that comes out of a GoPro transforms mere mortals into human
highlight reels, without blowing a huge hole in the budget. Shaun White, who
says he used to tape old cameras to his hand, used GoPros on his runs during
the Winter X Games. Hollywood directors, including Michael Bay, keep crates
of them on set. The NFL has tested them in their end zone pylons to capture
touchdown replays. The Rolling Stones deployed them on stage. Police forces
and the U.S. military have started to incorporate the cameras into training
exercises. Woodman, who calls it a “life” camera, proved the point by wearing
one on his chest at the deliveries of his sons. On the plane to Montana,
Woodman’s GoPro crew rigged their devices in every cranny in the cabin,
including on the pilots’ heads, to document their journey.
GoPro sales have more than doubled every year since the first camera’s debut
in 2004. In 2012 the company sold 2.3 million cameras and grossed $521
million, according to Woodman; with $100 million in sales in January alone,
that annual figure should again double this year. For the month of December
GoPro was the highest-grossing digital imaging brand at Best Buy, knocking
out Sony for the first time in the chain’s history. Just ten years old, GoPro was
responsible for 21.5% of digital camcorder shipments nationwide in the first
half of 2012, according to IDC data. Among “pocket camcorders” that figure
swells to a third.
This type of growth and niche dominance have made for a “rad” business
proposition, with Chinese electronics manufacturer Hon Hai Precision
Industry Co., better known as Foxconn, making a $200 million investment in
GoPro in December. That valued the San Mateo, Calif. firm at $2.25 billion
and shot Woodman, who sources say still owns about 45% of the company,
onto the FORBES World Billionaires list with a net worth of $1.3 billion.
The Mad Billionaire Behind GoPro: The World’s Hottest Camera Company – Forbes 22/10/2014 21:45
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It’s a head-spinning turn of events for a 37-year-old Peter Pan running a
billion-dollar technology company. As he barrels through Yellowstone’s
freshly groomed powder in a pea-green helmet, it’s clear he’s found bliss.
“YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEOW,” he howls from his bloodied and chapped lips as
he GoPros his every turn.
Forbes
World’s Billionaires 2013: Nicholas Woodman
The World’s Billionaires The names, numbers and stories behind the 1,426 people who control
the global economy. In Pictures: The Richest People on the Planet
As the youngest of four children, Woodman has always been something of a
schemer. Growing up in Silicon Valley’s prosperous Atherton (his father
brokered Pepsi’s purchase of Taco Bell), he was, as his teachers recall, a
“supremely confident” boy who wasn’t afraid to challenge those in charge.
“There was always a smile on his face, either a great big one or a kind of sly,
smirky thing,” said Craig Schoof, Woodman’s former baseball coach and
history teacher. “There was the, ‘yeah, I’m happy’ or the ‘yeah, I’m happy, and
I’m planning something.’ ” He once made a fiver by betting a biology teacher
he could run a mile under 6 minutes (he ran it in 5:40).
The Mad Billionaire Behind GoPro: The World’s Hottest Camera Company – Forbes 22/10/2014 21:45
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Woodman focused more on sports than books, maintaining a B+ average and
copping a middling SAT score. He eventually became wave-obsessed,
attending the University of California, San Diego because of its proximity to
sunshine and salt water. “ I remember my parents not being very supportive
of it,” he says. “But if I didn’t follow my passion for surfing … I would have
never come up with the concept to make a wrist camera.”
That concept came a few years after college after an online gaming service he
started, Funbug, went belly-up in the dot-com crash of 2000-01, taking with it
$3.9 million of investors’ money. “I’d never failed at anything before except
computer science engineering classes,” he says. “So it was like, ‘Holy s–t,
maybe I’m not capable of doing this.’”
To get his head straight again, Woodman lit out on a surf odyssey through
Australia and Indonesia, one last big trip before what he figured would
become a life of comfortable middle-class monotony. He brought a
contraption he’d made out of a broken surfboard leash and rubber bands that
allowed him to dangle a Kodak disposable camera to his wrist for easy
operation when the perfect wave hit. Close friend and current GoPro creative
director Brad Schmidt met Woodman in Indonesia and became one of the
first to toy with the strap. One of his first observations: Woodman needed a
camera durable enough to take the wear and tear of the sea. Five months into
being a surf bum, a recharged Woodman returned to California with the seed
of an idea.
Woodman, then 27, holed up in the house he shared in Moss Beach, Calif.,
just over the hills from Silicon Valley. He “checked out” from his normal life,
including friends and family, locking himself in his beachside bedroom to
build his first prototypes. Deciding that he had to sell the strap, the camera
and the casing, he armed himself with a drill and his mother’s sewing
machine and strapped a Camelback filled half with Gatorade and half with
water to his back (negating the 30-second walk to the kitchen) for 18-hour
work sessions. “I’d have a sliding door to the outside so I could just go take a
pee out on the bushes out on the side,” Woodman recalls. He gave himself
four years to make it work before he would drop his idea and enter the
workforce. “I was so scared that I would fail again that I was totally
committed to succeed.””After he took off, he was like, ‘I think I’m going to
start this wrist strap company for surfers,’” says Schmidt, who was skeptical.
Says Woodman: “I thought to myself, ‘If I made a few hundred grand a year,
I’m, like, in heaven.’”
Between sewing together old wetsuit material and drilling holes in raw plastic,
Woodman was constantly trolling online and at trade shows for a camera he
could modify and license as his own. He settled on a $3.05 35-millimeter
model made in China, sending his plastic cases and $5,000 on a prayer to an
The Mad Billionaire Behind GoPro: The World’s Hottest Camera Company – Forbes 22/10/2014 21:45
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unknown entity named Hotax. Woodman received his 3-D models and
renderings a few months later and sold his first product in September 2004 at
an action-sports trade show in San Diego.
That was the first validation for Woodman, whose friends thought their
former surfing buddy had held his breath underwater for a little too long. Neil
Dana, his roommate and first hire, recalls a work-obsessed guy constantly
fixated on success. “We would be at a party,” Dana recalls, “and he would
come up the stairs and be like, ‘Dude, check this out, this is how we’re going to
become millionaires!’ ” Woodman was only three zeroes off.
GoPro grossed $350,000 in its first full year of sales. Woodman was the allin-one
product engineer, R&D head, salesman and packaging model. He and
Dana rang up surf shops across the country hoping to get some of their
product out of Woodman’s father’s home in Sausalito and into the market. In
2005 he appeared on QVC three times, running into Spanx founder and fellow
future billionaire Sara Blakely while she was building her company as well.
(“If she remembers me, I’ll be amazed,” says Woodman. “But I’d love to get
word to her to give her a digital high-five on crushing it.”)
Woodman eschewed venture capital as he grew–a by-product of his Funbug
experience and a desire to work without suits interfering. Says Dana, “He
wanted to keep it private for as long as possible so he could get a Lotus for
‘product testing’ and do things and not have to answer to a board about it.” At
the outset Woodman dropped in $30,000 of his own money, as well as
$35,000 from his mother and two $100,000 investments from his father. The
company made money from that point and today boasts profit margins,
FORBES estimates, around 15%. It wasn’t until May 2011 that GoPro took on
$88 million from five venture firms including Riverwood Capital, led by
former Flextronics CEO Michael Marks, and Steamboat Ventures, Disney’s
venture investment arm, which allowed him, his family and some early
executives to take a good chunk of cash out.
That’s how Woodman can now fly via G-III, versus the days he spent sleeping
out in his 1971 Volkswagen bus or driving Penske trucks to set up trade show
booths with accessories he would later return to Home Depot after use. Back
then he was a trade show fiend, learning to sweet-talk executives and sell his
passion on the floors of conference centers from San Diego to Salt Lake City.
His big break: REI. Woodman spent months messaging executives and
shooting over progress reports before the outdoor sports giant succumbed,
giving the company (which is still technically called Woodman Labs) a huge
dose of validation.
The Mad Billionaire Behind GoPro: The World’s Hottest Camera Company – Forbes 22/10/2014 21:45
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With 2007 revenue in low seven-figures, Woodman had a crisis of confidence.
GoPro’s founder worried that he “couldn’t take the company any further” and
agreed to turn over majority control to a group of outside investors. And that
deal likely would have gone down except for the 2008 financial crisis. The
investors wanted to lower the valuation, and Woodman, his pride hurt and his
spine stiffened, refused. “We were going up and to the right, and the economy
wasn’t even affecting GoPro,” he says. The company wound up exceeding $8
million in sales that year, and has continued its organic growth. The next
turning point came in 2010 when Best Buy began carrying GoPro. Woodman’s
little idea had gone mainstream.
***
A little more than 72 hours after the ski trip to Big Sky country, a handful of
GoPro’s media team and I are half a mile off the coast of Half Moon Bay, Calif.
in a watercraft normally reserved for Navy Seals. Two hundred yards away,
the world’s best surfers hurtle down the famed Mavericks surf break armed
only with longboards, hubris and, yes, GoPros.
From our vessel, which is part of a 40-watercraft flotilla of paddleboards,
pleasure craft and dinghies, we watch 35-foot waves crash and clatter, mixing
sea spray with diesel fumes. Woodman tested the first GoPro prototypes near
these same icy waters. If you look around, you see the cameras are ubiquitous,
dangling from the mouths of surfers, held up by spectators and strapped to
the helmets of Jet Ski-zipping water rescuers. “You gotta GoPro the GoPro
boat,” yells out one onlooker from her craft, proceeding to point her gray box
toward our vessel. Hours later, footage of our boat and the day’s surfers ends
up on YouTube.
And, indeed, social media friendliness explains how GoPro went from niche to
blockbuster. In the hands of the right athletes the footage shot on a point-ofview
action camera is viral crack. For weekend warriors it’s the easiest way to
get your own three minutes of glory.
Though Woodman personally lacks a Twitter account and is inactive on
Facebook, he spends millions of dollars a year to make sure the GoPro name
is hashtagged with that blood-pumping shot of the GoPro-backed Shaun
White pulling off a 1080, or Felix Baumgartner plunging toward the ground
from the upper echelons of Earth’s atmosphere (Baumgartner wore five
GoPros on his record-breaking jump). “We’re building one of the world’s most
engaging and exciting consumer brands, and it’s largely on the content that
our customers are creating with their GoPros,” Woodman says. GoPro boasts
222 million views on its YouTube channel and 4.7 million likes on Facebook.
The Mad Billionaire Behind GoPro: The World’s Hottest Camera Company – Forbes 22/10/2014 21:45
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“It’s funny to see so many people with them, but it makes sense and that’s
great for the brand,” says surfer Kelly Slater, one of the many GoProsponsored
athletes. “They’ve quickly monopolized the idea in a way Band-Aid
or Q-tip has where everyone refers to these types of shots as GoPro shots or
expect it must’ve been shot with one.”
GoPro’s competitors are the first to acknowledge this. Giovanni Tomaselli,
founder of action camera maker iON Worldwide, says Woodman “deserves to
be a billionaire” for his innovation and that iON had “taken a leaf out of
[GoPro’s] book” when it came to promoting its first products, which launched
in 2012. But he remains defiant: “We do not believe this category is one-sizefits-all.”
There are also those who believe the category may not be here to stay. While
smartphones killed the need to own camcorders like the ill-fated Flip Camera,
they may also have the capacity to one day become the device that takes out
GoPro. Valley venture capitalist Greg Gretsch calls GoPro an “ephemeral
opportunity.” “The issue is that they’re a hardware manufacturer in a world
that’s quickly moving to the überplatform: the smartphone,” he says, pointing
out that iPhone and Android operating systems have hundreds of developers
writing software everyday.
Meanwhile GoPro must now deal with the big boys, who have finally taken
note of his success. Sony shipped its first action cameras in September and
says it is positioning itself as a “strong number two” with features like image
stabilization and stereo sound, which GoPro currently lacks. “We’re a camera
company first,” says Sony product manager Greg Herd. “GoPro is a mount
company first that sourced to cameras.”
Woodman says that the market he created is big enough for multiple
companies. And he’s only too happy to point out the stat about outselling
Sony at Best Buy in December. “For the first time Sony got beat, and it was
GoPro ” Woodman asks rhetorically. “That’s pretty awesome.”
Nonetheless, he’s also smart enough to know that GoPro needs to step up its
game. Which likely explains the recent Foxconn deal, which brought in $200
million. Woodman says that no one in the company has taken out a penny,
giving him a very formidable war chest. The intended use “Strictly
confidential,” Woodman says. And while they don’t need the cash for now,
Woodman doesn’t rule out the possibility of a public offering. “It’s something
that we think about: Would being a public company put us in a better position
to compete ” he says. “We’ll see.”
***
The Mad Billionaire Behind GoPro: The World’s Hottest Camera Company – Forbes 22/10/2014 21:45
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2013/03/04/the-mad-billionaire-behind-gopro-the-worlds-hottest-camera-company/print/ Page 8 of 8
This article is available online at: http://onforb.es/XEDJGn 2014 Forbes.com LLC™ All Rights Reserved
Two months after closing the Foxconn deal, Woodman is trying to say the
word “awesome” again, but in an open cockpit at 2,000 feet it’s a little hard to
talk. Soaring above the vineyards of California’s Sonoma County in a World
War II-era biplane, GoPro’s founder flaps his arms in sheer bliss. He takes the
pilot’s barrel roll to little ill effect and salutes a stomach-knotting midair stall
known as a hammerhead with his trademark yell,
“YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEOW,” which is quickly swallowed by the sound of the
plane’s propeller.
Having conquered the slopes and the sea, Woodman now wants to make
GoPro the go-to device for capturing “life’s precious moments.” He’s not the
only who thinks that. “My vision is to help global consumers build an
ecosystem in which capturing, sharing, viewing and creating content on any
device at any time in any place is convenient, effortless and cost-effective,”
says Foxconn CEO Terry Guo, who now sits on the company’s board. “GoPro
fits well into that ecosystem.”
That’s a big leap. But GoPro’s trajectory still remains up and to the right, and
will continue that way as long as it finds new uses and markets for its
cameras. “If we can become the de facto standard for image capture of unique
perspectives around the world we have a lot of growth ahead of us,”
Woodman says. Capturing some of those unique perspectives are the eight
GoPros trained on the CEO as he exits the biplane. As he unbuckles himself
from his harness and hops out of the plane, the cameras catch some of his
first words once he’s back on the ground: “This does not suck.”
Follow me on Twitter at @RMac18.
The Early Years of GoPro and Founder Nicholas Woodman
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