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!