In Class C4E Week 5

This past week my group’s main focus was on selling water bottles. Going into this week, we had about $20 of sales; we needed to sell $160 of water bottles to break even so we had a lot of work to do. Our plan was to sell them to Alex the Trainer and the School Store wholesale but they didn’t respond. When we tried to sell to people individually it rarely worked. Peter and Jessica went to a basketball game on Tuesday to try to sell bottles there but nobody bought one. It looked like we wouldn’t break even. Jessica had booked a table to sell at lunch on Thursday a few weeks ago. I didn’t think it would work but it was our last shot so Noah, Nitzan and I sold during first and second lunch. During first lunch our bottles weren’t really selling so in between the two lunches, we lowered our prices from $7 to $5. It was those two dollars that made a big difference. I think we sold about 20 bottles during second lunch alone which allowed us to barely break even.

Another thing that my group worked on this week was the presentation of our storefront proposition. We did a practice presentation on Thursday in front of Mr. Fischer in the BATV theater. I thought it went fairly well considering the fact that we didn’t have time to revise the slides or clarify who was presenting which slides. We did have a few mistakes on our slide but we fixed them. The only thing left for us to do is to rehearse as much as possible between now and next Thursday so we can impress the banker and get the $50,000 to start ImagiNation. This project is a culmination of all of our work this quarter so I hope it goes well.

Tipping Point Week 5

This past week, I finished The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. This reading was all about how the context of the situation is very important in order for a trend to tip. One example he references is crime rates in New York City. Crime in New York City was at an all time high during the 1980’s with the about 2,000 murders a year and about 600,000 felonies but in during the 1990’s the murders per year was one third of what it was during the 1980’s and the number of felonies per year were cut in half. Gladwell believes this sudden shift in crime rates was due to the Broken Window Theory. The Broken Window Theory states that if a window is broken, people will see it and think that nobody cares or is in charge. This leads to more broken windows. This basically means that the little things can have a big impact. In the late 1980’s, there was a new person in charge of the New York Transit Authority. While the subway had many problems, such as bad tracks which caused trains to derail frequently, he decided to spend a majority of their resources on getting rid of all the graffiti on trains. This was a large project since every train was covered in graffiti. He thought that “The Graffiti was symbolic of the collapse of the system”. Subsequently, the crime rates on the train decreased significantly.

I enjoyed this book a lot. I have always found statistics fascinating and I thought it was very interesting how Gladwell narrowed what determines if a trend will tip into three simple theories; The Law of Few, The Stickiness Factor and The Power of Context. I definitely plan on recommending this book because these theories would be very helpful to entrepreneurs and other people in business .

Tipping Point Week 4

This week, I read pages 100-137 of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. In this reading, I read all about the stickiness factor. The stickiness factor is how well the message or idea is conveyed to the consumer. The information in this section was presented to me through examples from Sesame Street. At first I was not sure what the message of Sesame Street was since it is only a kid’s show and I didn’t think there was a big idea being presented. As I read I learned how Sesame Street was the first attempt of an educational television program. During the 1960’s, when the show had just been invented, television was not a medium for education and many people thought that it would never work since people don’t pay enough attention to television. The writers of the show did a lot of consulting with professors from top universities around the country to figure out how make the ideas from the show stick in the head’s of children.  They would put kids in a room a play the show while they would study what made kids pay attention, how long did the kids pay attention for and how much of the information stuck with the kids after they left. They did studies like this for every episode and if kids did remember the information the writers would edit the show until the kids understood. I got the impression that the show was created to be one giant psychological study about how children’s minds work. I was astounded by the amount of seemingly unnecessary data these people had for a children’s show; they found the ideal length of a segment, the best way to teach the alphabet to children and more ways which were all critical in learning the best way to teach children. These principles of the stickiness factor are still used in other children’s shows and in commercials.

In Class Week 4

One of the things I spent time on this week was the cover letter for the storefront project. The purpose of the cover is to summarize what is said in parts 1-6 so that Mr. Gladstone has a general sense of what our proposition is.  It is kind of like an introduction paragraph in an essay.

Another thing that I did in class this week was a case study in preparation for the case study that I will write for the midterm. It was a lot harder than I expected; There was a lot of critical thinking involved and I felt like I didn’t have enough information to know what solution would be best for the company. I do believe that it will be easier to write my own case study based on the $200 assignment because it will be based on my own experiences.

Another thing that my group did this week was try to sell our water bottles. We only sold two which isn’t enough considering that we need to finish selling by next week. I think the reason that we didn’t sell a lot was because we had a very confusing flyer that had many different prices. I tried to sell to a group of people and each one of them told me that a different member of my group said that the bottle was cheaper than the price that my group agreed on; This was frustrating because they seemed interested but they thought I was charging them extra. My idea for selling enough bottles to make a profit by the end of next week is to talk to Mr. Marcus and see if he will buy most of them for a discount; This would get the inventory out of our hands which is important since the deadline is fast approaching.