Week Fifteen Reflection

It's difficult to believe that this past week was the last of the semester for HONB 200-02! Although we did not learn any new material, we were able to spend our last time together prior to the final reviewing important concepts that we've covered since the beginning of the course, as well as finally present our SMARTProjects.


On Tuesday, the class met for the final time in the typical marketing class setting. During this time period, we were able to review with Professor Spotts on a few of the most important marketing concepts that we had covered over the duration of the course. Although the original plan was for the class to watch and analyze a SharkTank episode, based on the four P's that make up any organization, we were unable to view the episode due to technical difficulties. Instead, the students were assigned a category of the four P's that their group was in charge of researching. After spending some time looking up this information in our books, each group took turns presenting to the rest of the class what the meaning behind their assigned "P" is, as well as relate this meaning to a real life scenario involving a business. My group specifically was in charge of learning more about the PESTLR concept, and how it relates to real life businesses.

 Although we had already learned this information in previous class sessions, it was definitely a helpful review in terms of further organizing our thoughts on these important marketing aspects. At the end of the class, we were given the Four P's Assessment, which is intended to be a cumulative exam that displays how much the students have learned over the entire semester. The exam consisted of two short answer questions that followed a given example of a theoretical business, through which the students were asked to evaluate and assess the four P's of the business, as well as think of ways in which the business could potentially improve one or more of their P's. Over this upcoming weekend, we were assigned our final mindmap to complete. This mindmap will be far larger than what we are typically used to creating, as it will be comprised of all of the most important concepts taken away from the entire course. Given the challenging nature of the assignment, I intend to set aside a large amount of time to devote to working on its creation.

On Tuesday night, my BedBug team had our final meeting prior to the exposition in order to finalize both our pitch and the product. We also made corrections to older memos that received suggestions for ways in which they could be improved, so that our final design file will display our best possible work. At this point in the SMARTProject process, my group had established an excellent sense of team chemistry and we were confident in both ourselves and the BedBug product.

Thursday was perhaps the biggest day of the semester for our HONB class, as this was the day of the engineering exposition, during which each group was given the opportunity to pitch their respective products in front of judges. Each member of the BedBug team was highly prepared with all of our materials and knowledge of the product, and were excited to finally demonstrate all of the hard work that we had put in over the course of the past few months. While we initially were slightly nervous in terms of delivering our pitch and speaking to those interested in the product, we soon began to warm up to the swing of things, which in turn made the experience a fun time for all of us. I found the exposition to be very satisfying and rewarding, as we were able to show others just how well we knew the product and how prepared we were to answer others' questions on it.

The day became even more of a success upon hearing the news that team BedBug had placed first overall amongst the freshmen SMARTProjects. This was a great feeling, and we could not have been more proud of ourselves as a team! I'm very glad that this project is in place, as it gives the students a chance to learn skills relevant to their fields in a realistic setting, as well as provide each student with experience that will benefit them in the long run. Overall, this was a great beginners' marketing course!

Week Fourteen Reflection

The past week in HONB 200-02 was spent primarily working on finishing the development of our SMARTProject products and their respective marketing plans. Instead of meeting for our typical class session on Tuesday, each team met privately with Professor Spotts to review their Brand Strategy Memos in order to receive the adequate feedback needed to finalize the final drafts. My BedBug team meeting went quite well, and we were able to thoroughly discuss the meaning behind the memo and thus its importance to the project overall.

Perhaps one of the most crucial aspects of the Brand Strategy memo is in the brand essence that each group chooses for their product to represent. One way to think of the brand essence is by comparing it to a human, or in other words, if the product was a person, what would their personality traits be? In this way, the creators of the product are able to create a unique identity that the product can clearly be identified by. The business students were given an assortment of brand archetype examples that the products could potentially identify with in terms of the archetypes' notable traits. Such archetypes to choose from included The Innocent, The Ruler, The Explorer, The Creator, etc. The brand archetype that my group ended up choosing was The Hero, as we believe that the BedBug embodies the majority of its personality traits. Upon choosing the said archetype, we then decided on the product's goal, traits, promise, drawbacks, and marketing niche:

Goal: Help people wake up on time and improve their productivity throughout the day.
Traits: Trustworthy, dependable, persistent, innovative
Promise: Triumph over sleep!
Drawback: Strict, singly focused
Marketing Niche: Increase punctuality, productivity, personal wellness

This decision allowed us to create a brand voice based off of the traits that we believe accurately represents the BedBug, as well as a promise to our target market of what it is that we plan on accomplishing with our product. We additionally further developed and finalized our value proposition, the statement of which we made sure to memorize for Thursday's class. Professor Spotts also helped us to create a buyer persona, which is essentially an example of a hypothetical person that is the epitome of our projected target consumer market. I believe that the Brand Strategy memo was highly beneficial to the business portion of our project, as it enabled us to fully develop our product's personality, which is essential to move forward in the marketing and advertising strategy process. We also received our reviewed Customer Discovery memo, which we were very happy to see had a relatively low amount of suggested corrections to be made on it.

Following this meeting, my project team held our own meeting later Tuesday night. We were extremely busy during this meeting, as we have so much to complete in such close proximity to the exposition. On the business side of the checklist, we worked on creating BedBug business cards based on the online templates that are offered, creating a Fact Sheet that displays our product and its most relevant information, as well as working to develop the pitch that we plan on stating at the exposition. While we were hard at work on these items, the engineers continued to finalize our product by continually testing it and preparing it for its official public demonstration.

On Thursday, the business students attended a joint class with the engineering students, to solely focus on the concluding of our projects. The class began with the marketing professor, Professor Spotts, and the engineering professor, Dr. Gettens, approaching each of the groups one at a time, and asking the business students questions on the product's engineering aspects, and the engineering students questions on the product's business aspects. This was a useful activity as it allowed us to see what we needed to learn more of in order to improve our knowledge on the product. Following this, we were given time to continue the development of our pitch. We received some helpful feedback from Professor Spotts of how we can improve the pitch, such as by incorporating a better beginning hook and being more enthusiastic throughout its delivery. This feedback was highly useful, and I am confident that our final pitch will be the perfect representation of our group as a whole. When given time to practice our pitch in front of the class, I believe that it stood out in terms of having an impact on the audience. We have a very busy week coming up ahead, but it will be exciting to see all of our hard work over the past semester come together and pay off at Thursday's exposition!

Week Thirteen Reflection

This past week was a very productive time period for the HONB200-02 class, specifically in terms of generating the final materials needed to conclude the SMARTProjects. My group in particular, the creators of the BedBug product, was extremely successful in finishing up the development of both the product itself and its value proposition. But in order to determine how exactly we plan to market our product, the entire HONB class further discussed communication through the form of advertisements, and thus marketing products as a whole, during Tuesday's class session. The class meeting began with Professor Spotts showing the group images that were used in British anti-smoking advertisements. These advertisements use the widely known cigarette brand Silk Cut in order to get their message across concerning the dangers of smoking.

Each advertisement that was shown presented a shockingly different image, however, each shared one aspect in common; this being the incorporation of the color purple, the same color that the Silk Cut logo is known to have. Whether the purple took up the majority of the picture frame, or only represented a small part of the entire ad, the same shade of violet was present in every picture as a negative reference to the cigarette producing company. Such a subtle aspect as this was missed by the students in the class, given that we were all unfamiliar with the brand that the ads were referencing, and thus also the point that they were trying to make. This lack of understanding by the students in the class created a failed communication between the source of the attempt and its recipient. The realization of the said failed communication attempt then led the class into a discussion about the process of communicating through advertisements, which plays a large role in marketing itself.

Through this discussion, the class was taught with use of a diagram that a message is initially created by the source, and in this message there lies an encoder. There is then supposed to be a shared code between the source and recipient, so that both have a common knowledge of what the message is about. With this shared code, there follows a decoder, and then the recipient, who will hopefully understand the meaning behind the message, and who will then be able to provide feedback. This communication process is essential for marketers to understand, so that they have the ability to utilize it properly to advertise for products through ways in which potential consumers/viewers comprehend. Following this, the class watched an Old Spice commercial, through which we witnessed an assortment of related marketing tactics take place.

Given that the commercial is geared towards men looking to buy deodorant, it directly addresses and appeals to women, under the assumption that women are typically the ones shopping for households. The commercial is centered around a man doing "manly" and exciting activities, including showering and using the deodorant in question, sailing, and riding horseback. With these images quickly replacing each other, the company is relying on the concept of incongruity to attract its audiences attention. It additionally incorporates the usage of primary and recency tactics. Primary refers to what the advertisement is primarily focused on, in this case deodorant, while recency is the last image that the audience sees from the ad. The importance of these techniques is that primary heavily emphasizes what the entire ad is all about, and recency leaves the audience with a lasting image of what the purpose of the advertisement, and thus the company itself, is. So, in this case, with Old Spice putting out an erratic commercial, the last image shown of which is highly unusual, the viewers will be more likely to remember the advertisement and the product when they see it actually in stores.

The class then shifted its focus from these advertising tactics to the importance of a promotional mix in the marketing communication process. The three main points of the process are:

• Informing
• Persuading 
• Connecting

These points are established and made with the promotional mix, which makes up one of the four P's in the marketing mix in general. The promotional mix of a company involves the public relations, advertising. and sales promotions that are implemented to generate product sales and profit. Upon establishing this insight, we then moved on to talk about the difference between advertising and publicity. Advertising, as it's run by the business in question, is always positive in order to promote the company and its product(s). Publicity, on the other hand, is generated by outer sources other than the business itself and therefore can be either positive or negative. The potential of there being publicity out of a business's control leads to the need for each company to have a public relations team. The purpose of public relations is to seek to manage the company's publicity so that the public typically sees the positive light in any and all press related to the business.

Finally, Professor Spotts presented the class with the AIDA Model, which consists of four levels:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

The newly acquired knowledge of this model will be extremely useful as we continue developing the marketing surrounding the BedBug product, as it lists the steps necessary to perform in order to draw in our consumer audience, and achieve the final step. This step of action, however, typically refers to the investing in our product, as opposed to the buying of it. When implemented correctly, the AIDA model will help businesses gain consumer interest in their product, and furthermore, lead them to their final purchase, or investment, in it.

With all of this marketing information fresh in our minds, we joined the engineers in class on Thursday and were given the entire class time to work on whatever each group needed to complete. In my group's case, this was the Value Proposition poster and the beginning of our Brand Discovery Memo. Upon receiving some helpful advice from both Professor Spotts and Professor Gettens, we were able to alter our poster to depict exactly what we wanted it to, while retaining its aesthetic appeal. Later that same day, my business partners and myself met with our professor privately to go over what we have developed thus far in the project, as well as receive some feedback on any questions we had concerning the upcoming memo. In conclusion, the BedBug poster has been finalized, and my teammates and myself are highly confident in our positioning for the upcoming few weeks. We look forward to completing our Brand Discovery Memo and begin developing/practicing our product's pitch. Leading up to the exposition, it should be an exciting and busy two weeks!

Week Twelve Reflection

This past Tuesday in HONB 200-02, the students did not have to attend class at its regular time. Instead, each SMARTProject group was required to meet individually with Professor Spotts to go over the progress that we had made on our customer discovery memos at that point in the week. Upon meeting with Professor Spotts, we began by showing him the most important statistics that we had gathered from our 27 distributed consumer surveys. Such relevant information included:

• 14 survey respondents are heavy sleepers, 13 are light sleepers
• 20 survey respondents hit their snooze button multiple times
• 19 respondents, or 70.4%, would consider investing in the BedBug product

We relayed the highlights of our gathered information to Professor Spotts, who then provided us with some advice in terms of ways in which we can go about marketing the product to our future target market. Additionally, we were then questioned about the research that had been conducted thus far on the industry that our product falls categorized under. Such research was suggested to be done via the information databases found online, known as IBISWorld Industry Reports and MarketResearch.com. However, given that our product is unique in both its technological functions and its close relation to bedroom furniture, the BedBug does not belong in any one industry. Rather, the market research gathered for it can be found under a combination of multiple industry reports, including mattresses, bedroom furniture, and furniture wholesaling in the United States. 

As I was in charge of conducting research using the IBISWorld Reports, I began to heavily research all of the above stated industries on the website immediately following our group meeting. I was able to find multiple reports containing adequate information valuable to the BedBug's market research, such as the industries' performance over past recent years. This variance in the performance levels allowed me to assess the potential that BedBug would have to be successful in future years, based off of the industries that it could belong in. From this, I was able to write my one page summary on the IBISWorld Industry Reports for my group's customer discovery memo. 

On Thursday, the business students had their first combined class with the engineers in weeks. While the engineers of each group have been tirelessly working on developing the product to turn the SMART ideas into realities, the business students were able to use this class time to discuss and inform the engineers on everything that we've been working on thus far in terms of the discovery of our products' target customers. During this time, each group was assigned the task of developing a customer process in which we predicted the anticipated before, during, and after reactions of our consumers upon addressing the painpoint that the BedBug is designed to fix. 

My group determined that the before phase of the painpoint involves the consumer sleeping. The during phase refers to the awakening of the sleepy consumer, upon which they realize that they have overslept/missed their alarm for whatever reasons, and are therefore late for any important engagements that they had planned for that day. Finally, the after phase revolves around the stressed consumer rushing late to their class, job, interview, etc, and dealing with whatever consequences result from their delayed arrival. The groups then drew up charts on the whiteboards that consisted of sections: quotes and ideas, thoughts and feelings, and actions and behavior. Each of the sections were written in based on survey results. 

Upon the completion of this, the groups were then instructed to devise a value proposition for each product, which is a headline that is supposed to summarize a product in a short catchphrase. Our group was content with the final decision on the BedBug's headline. "Shake up your wake up!". Overall, this past week was very productive in the advancement of our product, and we hope to continue this advancing throughout this upcoming week and beyond.