Week 5

On Tuesday, we did a gallery walk of our mind maps and of our advertisements for Bambooee.  As the weeks go on, the mind maps become more and more detailed, and start to leave the organization of the textbook chapter notes. Additionally, we were told to make advertisements based on our market segment. When looking around at all the advertisements, it is interesting how the market segments clustered together. As we presented our individual advertisements to the class, you could see how some matched up and were seen as similar, whereas some were so diverse which changed the entire mission of the ad. We learned that market segmentation is based on a variety of factors: 

1) Demographics

2) Age
3) Monetary Income
4) Family Life Cycle
5) Geography
 6)Psychographics 

All of these factors add up to the overall importance between market segmentation, and can help businesses target their product and market it to a specific group. For example, some of the students in the class had a wealthy class who liked to go out and party, lived in an urban setting, and few had children. For those advertisements, some of the students symbolized a mess through a spilt wine glass and emphasized on how Bambooee could help them clean up after their parties quickly and efficiently. Considering they are not tight on budget, it would be rare for them to be looking at cost as a major decision maker. However, the market segment that I promoted Bambooee for was a low income family who struggles to make ends meet. They might not go for an advertisement about how this product cleans up after a lavish party, for that is why I focused on cost with this group. Either group may not have been attracted nor interested in the product if the marketing of it did not relate to their circumstances, and that is why segmentation is so important!!

On Thursday, we had a joint class with the Engineering students to reflect on our progress with the Smart Project. This was an interesting day for me because I had a softball recruit and was supposed to be showing her what a typical class is like at Western New England University, but this class is not the least bit ordinary. Nevertheless, she was very interested in the class. I liked how she helped my group with our post its for other groups. It was good to see an outside perspective. We all know each others' products now, so we have become biased to what we like and what we do not like; or what we would buy versus what we would not buy. So for someone who had never been introduced to these products, it was nice to see her reaction and she provided great feedback even though she has not taken an engineering or marketing course before; for it was strictly based on her consumer institution. 

Each group presented their revised point of view statement, their three final concept solutions and their ideas for logos. As a class, we were able to walk around and make comments on which type of logo we preferred and if the concept solutions matched our vision of fixing that specific bug. Overall, I think our class did a very nice job. It was quite evident that each of the groups worked hard on making their product vision understanding for their audience. As I walked around, I tried to use the knowledge I have obtained from Shark Tank and the textbook to evaluate my peers. For example, I noticed that one of the products our class is creating is a Trend product. If they were trying to go public with this product, then it would not be a company to invest in. Additionally I noticed some products do not necessarily have a huge target market. So, their chances of going public with this product may happen, but the results may be dissatisfying, Although that is not the purpose of the Smart Project, as we are not doing this for our own monetary success, it is important to notice as we continue on in the course and become apart of the business world. It is helpful to point these things out as we learn them so we can retain the information we are reading about. If I was not utilizing my knowledge from the Textbook and Shark Tank, well, then this would probably be pointless. 

After we got our comments from the class, we were able to reflect on those comments as a group and then address the audience. Some of the questions and concerns we received were just a means of miscommunication. For example, we got a question on if someone else could take the breathalyzer test for someone else. No, for that is why we have a fingerprint scanner and why bars have bouncers to check for suspicious activity occurring. We received some comments on our logo, and on what type of concept we should go with. That was great to hear about because sometimes when you are so close to something, you cannot see the big picture. For example, we thought our logo is great. We thought that we didn't even need to work on it, but most of the people did not like it. This means we need to evaluate ourselves in an unbiased way in order to make our idea the most successful it can be. I appreciated the constructive criticism we received, and I look forward to utilizing that in our final concept solution and final logo. 

Our next OK TO DRIVE team meeting is on Monday, where the engineers will focus on combining the positive components of each concept solution, and the business students will be looking for new ways to market our product through the logo.