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Follow on TwitterThis week The Apprentice 2009 candidates were tasked with creating a marketing campaign for a new breakfast cereal. The campaign should include a character and they have to produce a box and TV advert. Sounds reasonable, so off they all ran to do some market research. Except they didn’t, they wandered off to brainstorm. In the case of the losing team to argue. So the first two lessons for this week are:
- Market research matters – you need to determine two key things: who you’re targeting and how to target them; who the competition is and how you can create a competitive advantage.
- As a leader you need to direct the team away from negative, wasteful arguments towards a solution.
Sadly as one team leader allowed lots of pointless arguments to drag on they ran out of time to fully develop their concept. Subsequently they failed to properly brief the designer who was working in their box and as a result it was shockingly bad. Which brings us to the next two lessons:
- If you’re managing a project you need to spend time identifying all the tasks that need to be done, then you need to make sure that resources (time, people, money and material) are allocated to them.
- Don’t delegate responsibility for a deliverable to an unaccountable third party. The graphic designer had no vested interest in improving their poor design so just delivered exactly what they asked for an nothing more.
When it came to delivering the pitch for their designs one team did well, the other, who lost were appalling. They pitched at the wrong level, not treating their audience like clients. The lesson here:
- pitch your presentation to your audience’s level.
Once again most of The Apprentice candidates where better at demonstrating how not to do business than they were at actually doing business. Fortunately the other team did manage to just get on with the task and produce a reasonable (given the time constraints) marketing campaign.
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It’s all about the team members isn’t it? The winning team did well, they gelled, seemed happy together and came up with a good campaign. The losing team were at loggerheads from the moment go with power hungry individuals and non entities. I do wonder though, how the winning project leader would have faired with the losing team, would she have had the management skills to get that team together, I doubt it. If you’ve got a negative camp it’s almost impossible to get ‘fired’ up