This instalment of The Apprentice saw the candidates tasked with making two new natural beauty products, which they’d spend the second day of the task selling to the public in central London. In theory it’s an easy task as the profit margins (as Sir Alan Sugar reminds them) on beauty products are very high – therefore the winning team should be the team that sold the most. So how would you make sure that your team sold the most? The answer is marketing.

So how does marketing relate to this task on The Apprentice? Well the American Marketing Association offers this definition of marketing:

…the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

They key part that the would be apprentices should have considered is the creating of offerings by doing some market research to determine what the market needs or wants. Sadly as per usual on The Apprentice both teams just winged it, not even their "marketing experts" seem to have heard of market research. However as it turns out both teams had more fundamental problems.

The team that won hardly deserved to win, having suffered under a team leader who seemed unable to make a simple decision, leading to several moments of awkward silence. Only when it came to selling did he make any firm decisions and then they weren’t the best, giving us the first business lesson of this week:

• In retail location matters – for some reason the team leader decided to move from a good location, where they were successfully selling (well other members of the team were) to a relaxed set of customers to Bond Street tube station. Not surprisingly few commuters stopped to buy from them as they rushed past. The lesson, people who are rushing somewhere are unlikely to stop and let you sell to them.

However despite the best efforts the team leader couldn’t quite manage to loose to the other team. Why? Because the other team had somehow managed to forget the lessons they should have learned from the first task:

• when starting a business, keep your costs as low as possible as every penny you spend has to be earned back before you start making a profit.

Blowing an amazing £1140 on the ingredients for their product. Which sadly even their relatively good sales effort failed to make up, resulting in their team making a loss. What’s most amazing is the fact that at least one team member did remind their team leader that they needed to make costs and she did then appoint two members of the team to track costs. Sadly one abstained responsibility and the other made a crucial mistake – calculating the cost of essential oils at £5 rather than the £700+ that it actually was. There’s two more business lessons here:

• If as a leader, you assign a task to someone, make sure they do it.
• If you’re in charge of a business you absolutely have to understand the figures and be able to determine and manage your costs. No matter what your background.

Sadly once again The Apprentice contestants where better at demonstrating how not to do business than they were at doing business.

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