Week Nine Reflection

This past week in HONB 200-02, the class primarily focused on the SMARTProjects and the ways in which we can approach marketing and selling the resulting products. On Tuesday, each team met privately with Professor Spotts to thoroughly review and discuss the survey questions for our projects. Upon receiving feedback, our group was able to successfully finalize our questions and we plan on asking them soon to potential businesses that could carry our product. Additionally, we were given advice in terms of places we could go to implement our surveys in the hopes of obtaining the most accurate results. Such places included Sears and other related mattress stores in the general Springfield area that we can easily approach salesmen in. The results of this should help our group be able to specially customize our BedBug product so that it can be a viable option for future potential customers to enjoy.

On Thursday, the class was divided up into our respective project teams and each student in the teams took turns picking questions out of a hat to go over as a group and devise answers for. Each question was based off of the textbook's chapter 19, Pricing Concepts. This exercise was important to each of the teams as it allowed us to begin generating ideas on how we plan to market and sell our product. Such ideas involved determining the selling price of our product, the pricing strategy that we will choose to use, as well as various other ways in which we can increase the sales of it, i.e. discounts, rebates, etc. When considering these questions, my BedBug group unanimously decided that it would be wise to implement a bundling process when selling the product. Such a process could include bundling it with other related bed accessories, such as bedsheets, mattress toppers, pillow cases, and other similar bed items.

 There would additionally be both a seasonal discount and rebate system in place to encourage greater sales, especially at times when there may not be as large of an amount of sales as in other times of the year. One question that I found particularly interesting during this class activity was concerning the price sensitivity of our future theoretical product consumers. Considering the fact that our product's target market is predicted to be early risers who struggle to get up in the mornings, such as college students and international businessman traveling between time zones, we decided that our consumer base would be fairly sensitive to price variability. College students would be highly sensitive to the product's price, given their typical lack of monetary funds, whereas businessman would be slightly less sensitive to the price in comparison to college students, yet are still sensitive to it.

Overall, I found the class session to be very effective in terms of gaining a stronger sense of what our future price for the product will be, and what strategies we will use to promote the product's sales. We are excited to begin officially constructing our product, along with its various other related sales aspects.