Week 5 in Review

     Last week was an interesting week.  On Tuesday, we did another gallery walk this time on chapters 6 and 7.  I found that a lot of concept maps focused more on consumer decision making as opposed to business marketing.  For most of the class we went over the purchasing cycle for paper towels and the Buzzy product.  Matt and Julia presented their paper towel visual together.  Mine varied a little bit from theirs.  I said the trigger was a consumer needed a product that would be able to clean household spills.  The information search would consist of the consumer traveling to a local store and looking for the aisle containing paper towels.  The consumer would then browse the paper towel selection looking for the ideal paper towel.  The consumer would compare price, absorbancy, amount of paper towels per roll, and they would also look at the brand itself to see if they know it.  They would then purchase the product they thought would be best for them.  Then they would decide if the paper towel was a good or bad purchase.  If it was good, the next time they need paper towels they will get the same kind.  If it was a bad product they would start the process again in order to find a better product.  Buzzy is a different selling process entirely.  Buzzy, according to the Sharks, should be sold to businesses which makes it a business to business purchase.  Stephanie made a very good presentation on her visual for the purchasing of Buzzy.  Doctor Spotts cleaned it up a bit and adding a few important pieces.  The trigger for the purchase is a Doctor seeing a need for a product that eases the pain of shots for children.  The doctor initiates the trigger and then goes to the hospital's purchasing department and tells them to look into a product that will help with the pain of shots.  So the hospital's purchasing department looks into different products on the market that would solve this problem.  Somebody comes across Buzzy and recommends it be purchased.  If the hospital finds it acceptable the Buzzys will be purchased for the Hospital.  The Doctor, now the user, uses the product to help ease shot pain.  If the Doctor finds it to be a good product, the hospital will continue to buy them.  If they end up being bad, the Doctor may ask the purchasing department to look for something better.  When talking about Buzzy, we also talked a little bit about derived demand.  Derived demand is the demand for a product that is derived from the demand of something else.  Because there is a demand for a less painful shot experience, the demand for Buzzy increases.  After talking about this we ended the class by watching Shark Tank.  On this episode, we saw a man pitch the custom clothing company Bello Verde.  This episode was used to teach us about product and branding.  Bello Verde would be a specialty product because it is custom clothing which is a luxury the average person does not have.  The company seemed to lack any augmented product because the show did not say  if the clothing had any kind of guarantee that would reduce the perceived risk of the product.  In terms of a tangible product, the company offers full canvas construction as well as a huge range of custom clothing options.  The core product though is the custom clothing process.  On their website Bello Verde has a list of questions that will size you without even needing to leave the house.  They also have local representatives that will go out and create a custom design with you for you.  They pick the style for you if you have no idea what you are doing.  The Sharks ended up ripping him apart.  He had bought the company he previously worked for and was now using the old company's name and Bello Verde at the same time.  They also believed he valued his company at 10 times the actual value because he believed that the company would grow into a company of that value. 

     On Thursday, we met with the engineers except instead of them coming to us, we went to them.  We went the Sleith Hall instead of meeting in the library and I had to go on an exploratory mission in order to find the stairs and then the classroom.  We sat at tables that had a big post-it easel and three large sharpies.  The first thing we did was write out the 5 of our environmental analysis on the post-it and presented our findings.  We discovered there are two ways that heated driveways currently radiate heat.  Heat is radiated either through water or electric wire.  The next point was that our competitive environment included snow shovels, snow blowers, and other heated driveway companies.  The third was that our economic environment included people of the upper class that could afford the get a driveway hooked up with a heating system.  Our socio-political environment was people who were older, limited physically, or they were too busy to shovel.  Unfortunately I cannot recall our fifth point.  After presented our findings to the class, we moved onto a team share.  We re-wrote our POV statement, we found our criteria and constraints, decomposed the problem, and we also defined the market.  Our POV statement was very similar to our original one because we felt it described our problem well enough.  Our constraints we found to be money because we only had 100 dollars to create a prototype.  Size was another constraint because we can't fit an entire driveway into the room where we are presenting our design.  The second constraint is safety because we can't let our customers get electrocute by our product.  Our criteria was that the product had to acctually melt snow because if it didn't, it wouldn't be successful.  We also want it to be cost effective in order to make it a more favorable choice over other heated driveway companies.  Our decomposed problem included the problem of how are going to find out how much resistance is required and how are we going to make this more desirable to customers with less money?  We defined our market as people who were either too busy to shovel, unable to shovel, or too old to shovel.  They also needed to be located in an area with a regular snowfall to make the heated driveway worth it to buy.  We the did a gallery walk and got to view everyone's ideas.  We had to leave three comments.  I found that most of the other groups, their POV statements were still too vague.  Most had a solid market definition though.  After walking around we returned to our seats and we all sketched out an idea for our product.  We then rotated the paper and attempted to finish each others drawing.  After the first time, all of our products looked exactly the same.  We did it again but this time we had to do totally different designs.  We all settled on what we were drawing and go to it.  My group ended up really liking my design so now we have a bit of a dilemma.  Which design are we going to go with? Hopefull by next week we'll have it all figured out and ready to go by Thursday.