Reflection: Week 14

This week’s blog entry is going to be different than the past couple of weeks. This week was very centered around the SMART project and less centered around learning marketing concepts. There are, however, several marketing concepts that relate to what we accomplished this week.

Sunday:

ThermoWheel is an explorer

Sunday evening, we conducted a team meeting to revise the brand strategy memo, start the pitch, and continue working on designing the product. Our marketing consultant, Sam Heffer, attended the meeting. First, we revised the brand strategy memo. Sam greatly aided us in making the necessary revisions. She taught us that it will be more effective for our brand to embody one or two brand archetypes rather than three or four. Embodying two brand archetypes will allow for our brand to have a stronger personality that will become more identifiable over time. Sam also helped us revise the “promises” section of the memo. Sam suggested that we add something a satisfaction guarantee in our promise. We noted all of Sam’s suggestions and took time to implement them.

ThermoWheel is also a rebel

Additionally, Sam was very helpful in designing the pitch. She helped us figure out how to establish our credibility and introduce our product. Sam suggested that we include our value proposition in the pitch—or something close to it. Including our value proposition will help us stay consistent in the features and benefits we highlight. We tried to think of a creative way to engage our potential investors such as asking them what the first thing is that they do when they get in their car in the winter. We were unable to make a creative statement like this flow, however. Instead, we decided to talk about our brand using language that aligns with the brand archetypes we established. We plan to end our pitch by asking our investor if they are ready to join the revolution ThermoWheel is leading.

Tuesday:

The business students met with Dr. Spotts on Tuesday during scheduled meeting times instead of having a traditional class period. During our meeting with Dr. Spotts we went over the brand strategy memo. In discussing the brand strategy memo, we realized that we made several errors. Our team did not include a buyer persona or positioning statement. Aside from those errors. Dr. Spotts approved of our brand essence and brand voice. Dr. Spotts also liked the promises we created for our brand.

After going over the brand strategy memo, Dr. Spotts discussed some upcoming assignments we would need to complete before the engineering exposition, which is next Thursday. One of those assignments is a fact sheet. Another one of those assignments is creating business cards for every team member to give out during the engineering exposition. Our team is planning to discuss how we want the fact sheet and business cards to look.

Once the meeting with Dr. Spotts concluded, we headed over to the library and made the necessary revisions to both our brand strategy memo and customer discovery memo. We feel that we are now in a good position to earn full credit for both of these memos at the end of the semester!

Wednesday:

PRACTICE! PRACTICE! PRACTICE! Wednesday I carved out some time to practice rehearsing our pitch and value proposition.

Thursday:

The pitch is how we will attract potential investors!

Thursday’s class was a joint class period with the business students and engineers. We were given time during class to work on and practice our pitch. We were also tasked with learning the engineering side of our project. It is important to know the technical aspect of our product so we can talk about it at the exposition. When listening to and learning from the engineers, I noticed that it is hard for them to put technical terms in laymen’s terms. Our engineers were particularly frustrated with the fact that the business students did not know how a circuit worked.

Thursday night we had a team meeting to further prepare for the engineering exposition taking place next Thursday. During the team meeting, we worked on the fact sheet, practiced the pitch, and the engineers took time working on finishing the product. With a little more practice on the pitch, we will be ready to go for the expo!

Shark Plan:

My SharkPlan is about a product named GreenBox

I have been working on the Shark Plan assignment since Spring Break. It is hard to believe that the end of the semester is here and it is almost time to turn the assignment in. This week, I focused on completing the target market strategy section of the assignment. I am glad that I waited to complete this section because the research I have conducted along the way has greatly helped me answer the required sections.