Enterprise week offers a range of activities and events designed to provide business people and buddying entrepreneurs with a range of commercial opportunities, networking forums and challenges.Personally; this week increased my confidence in both myself and my academic abilities.
The main event for myself was the 'Apprentice Challenge' as myself and some other course friends got together and made team...
SMARTYPANTS
Firstly; team SmartyPants had to find out who our sponsor for the challenge was. All sponsors were drawn out of a hat at the meeting at the Crown Plaza in Marlow. We were matched with Andrew from a finance agency. Once the meeting was over, he sat down with us and advised us on ways to raise money and the best ways to market ourselves. He gave us our initial investment of £50 and gave us his number as we both went our separate ways.
The first task was to buy as many doughnuts as we thought we would need, and then sell them at a reasonable price in the Eden Centre High Wycombe. Eventually, our team decided to buy 200 jam doughnuts from leading supermarket Tesco. This was our last option as we wanted to get them at a discounted rate, but all other shops were far to expensive. This cost us £30. However, we did need to buy tissues and plastic gloves to serve them with. By then end of the day all our doughnuts had sold and we had raised £265.
We were through to the next round! Our next task was to hold a stall in the Eden Centre selling any products of our choice. We decided that selling cakes would be fairly easy as we had already had experience in this through selling doughnuts. We also decided to make home-made Christmas cards, as not many places in High Wycombe sell them - so there was a niche in the market. Both Chris and myself thought it would be a great idea to get coffee to sell with the
cakes, so we went to Starbucks and asked them to donate.
Unfortunately; we were not able to sell this coffee but was able to give it out with our cakes, on the condition we used Starbucks cups, and sugar. Therefore offering Starbucks free marketing in return for then giving us coffee. This was a great selling point for us as people were more subjected to buy our cakes.
Even though this task started fairly slow, we were fortunate enough to be outside Marks and Spencer - who were holding their annual 1p sale. So we instantly had a crowd to sell our products too. This task continued for 6 hours and raised us a total of £56.
This enables us to get through the the semi-final stage of the event. Now we had to come up with an event plan, which we were to pitch to a panel of people who would have the deciding vote on what 2 teams out of the 4 would go through to the final - these would be the ones with the best business ideas. If we were to get through this we would get another £100 investment from Andrew to help fund our event. SmartyPants, decided to hold a James Bond Night in the Student Union where we would have poker tables, jelly vodka shots and many other attributes for the night. We all got very excited, and I believe this showed when pitching our idea. WE GOT THROUGH!
Next was to make posters, tickets and a Facebook event page to inform the student audience of our event. These are shown below.
I made 3 posters to cater to different peoples tastes:
These were the tickets:
This night was a success and we raised a total of £574.40 from our initial £150 investment. Thus, us winning the Apprentice Challenge of 2009 :) :)
An advertising and marketing communication industry panel came into Bucks New Uni to talk to us. The panel consisted of:
- Sue Elms - Millwood Brown
- Sue Ullerman - Mediacom
- George Hudson - Burson Marsteller
- Rick Haslam - RAPP
- Matthew Chapman - Billets
Obviously, these are huge companies to have talk to us, and all entail interesting anecdotes and experiences in the industry. The first thing they all have in common is that they have all embraced digital for advertisement. This raised the question whether straight advertisement works on sites such as Facebook or Twitter in the 21st Century? The answer stated by Sue Elms was “sometimes”. This is because “social sites are not being used to their full potential as they are not understood com
It was said that there are too many digital immigrants in comparison to digital natives. The industry needs digital natives as they are experts in how the new digital era works- it’s their second nature. The industry needs them as they have seen digital develop and have used them whilst growing up; therefore they will not need to be taught the skills.
The next point was whether the brand or product is more important in terms of advertisement? In the 21st Century advertising included publishing, creating and building the brand, this is mainly due to the role of television, internet and the consumer (Sue Ullerman, 2009). Advertising is there to make the consumer want the brand as it creates interaction between them both as well as shaping the product in the consumers head. This view suggests that advertisement is mainly focused on the brand and is only there to add value to the product itself. Advertising the brand rather than the product may also be due to the economic crisis as it is cheaper to advertise a brand rather than a product as it can be used for all products. For example, most people buy Apple because of the brand not the product. On the other hand George Hudson states “the power of the product is still valuable”, this is because it needs to live up to the expectations of the brand.
The skills required in this industry are; to be passionate about the job, enthusiastic, innovative and have good communication skills. Which are attributes I hope to have in the near future.
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