Godin's Words Seen in Everyday Life

This final week of reading Seth Godin’s The Purple Cow has lead me to his overarching message for the entire book, “Explore the limits and become a Purple Cow.” Early on in the book Godin foretells of a slow and bitter end to the modern ways of advertising and marketing. Our lives have become oversaturated with consumer goods and almost all of our basic human needs and wants have been fulfilled, so mass-marketing has become less and less effective. Too many companies are attempting to build products that remain within the herd, battling their other competitors for a short and never-sweet-enough second in the spotlight. Capitalistic Darwinism has been in effect for many decades now, but it is unable to be as harsh and respect-demanding as it once was. Today, most companies worth their salt are parts of massive industrial conglomerates that have billions in cushion-funding available to protect them from any failed venture that would lose in an exhibition of survival-of-the-fittest. This lesson is especially vital for anyone looking to enter an industry already flooded with a herd of competitively identical products backed by massive corporations. Although most products in the herd will discover they same failing fate, they will have the means to recover, and you, as a start-up, will not be able to keep up. You must be different if you want your product to survive.

I was walking through the mall before Christmas, looking to buy any remaining gifts when I came across a large rack of winter gloves in the middle of a department store. I saw a real-life example of Godin’s words, the rack was filled from top to bottom with what must have been over 60 different pairs of seemingly identical black gloves. I wasn’t in the market for gloves and nobody I was shopping for needed a pair, but had I been searching and had I stumbled upon this example of over-saturation, I wouldn’t have much to base my decision off of. These micro-moments of consumer decision, blown up over several occurrences over a long period of time, are what make or break a product. You must be the greatest or the least if your product is to have any chance at success. The cheapest, the fastest, the largest, the smallest, the easiest, etc. If one of these gloves had been made by a company not backed by millions or billions of dollars they would surely be destined for defeat in the Darwinistic concrete jungle of modern industry. Don’t be another black glove on the rack, be the brightest, the boldest, the cheapest, or the softest glove you can be.

Hindsight Bias and Getting Back Up on the Horse

As the businessmen and women who came to class to speak told us, entrepreneurship is all about learning from your mistakes and getting back up on the horse when you fall. Staying positive in the face of adversity and failure is key to be being successful. You have to spend a lot of time being bad at something to eventually become good at it, and the trades of business are no different. The $200 project was full of bad experiences and lessons to be learned for the next time, and as it came to a close this week I came to terms with what I needed to do better in the future.

Going into this week I was feeling an amount pressure and stress unlike that of any other project I have done in school. Several factors, including owing someone actually money and having to get people to give me money so that the project was to be successful, lead to this. We tried several times over the first three days of this final week to sell the water bottles, that no one seemed to want, to no avail. Our contacts on the sports teams wanted nothing to do with us and my idea for contacting the athletic administration was leading to dead ends. When a classmate and I tried to sell outside a basketball game on Wednesday afternoon, one of the trainers who works with Alex laughed in my face as he told me there was no reason they would buy our inferior and more expensive bottles. With the deadline looming and an authority figure actually laughing in my face, I went home from the sales attempt in a mildly sized pit of despair.

Our last hope was Thursdays E-block, a ninety-minute stretch that three of our members had free. These students reserved a table and posted up outside of the cafeteria over the course of both lunches to make our final stand. The evidence from all of the other attempts in the weeks prior would lead one to believe that this would end like all the others, in failure. I was preoccupied ushering the MLK assembly and attending class, but around half way through the block I recieved a text that made me jump out of my seat. Apparently, by docking the price to $5, we were able to break even in under 40 minutes. I guess a good price is just too good for Brookline kids to pass up on, no matter the quality or need for a product.  

Although this saving grace pulled us from the flames at the last moment, it would not be wise to bank on such a thing happening again in the future. Out execution of this project was messy from the moment it began up until its end. I learned about the dire and otherwise obvious need for market research before making an investment. We ultimately bought a product that very few people actually needed or wanted at its full price. If we had put more time and thought into understanding what people wanted and then designing a product from there, we would have had a much easier time. Secondly, my experiences as the team leader for this project have given me a better understanding of when to take the reigns and when to let your workers use their own intuition. Last week when we were wasting time making a useless flyer, I should have stepped in. But this Thursday when the team made an executive decision to lower the prices in the moment without telling me, it was definitely the best idea available. Intervening with the team’s entrepreneurial instincts in this moment would have lead to failure. Overall this project gave me plenty of headaches, but has also sharpened my acumen and made me pumped for the next opportunity to prove myself.

Follow the Flow Down

This week’s reading of Seth Godin’s Purple Cow lead to a discussion about how to reach your audience when your initial strategies fail. This one idea, in a sea of many, resonated with me, my group, and our current situation. Basically, we have a lot of product, we wasted a week of precious time to ultimately futile ends, and now only have a week left to sell enough product to pay back our investor and hopefully make a profit. Our flyers yielded little to no responses and when one of our members attempted to sell by means of a table we only sold one bottle. As team leader, I am getting desperate as I look for ideas and new strategies to kickstart a reinvigoration process as our deadline looms.

One method Godin mentions is to find someone in your industry who has a track record of successfully launching remarkable products and then them help you. Although we are merely a group of high school students, not yet players in a major industry, this idea still applies. We are selling a mainly athletic product, so we can consider the athletics sector of Brookline High School to be our “industry.” Now, finding someone who has their finger on the pulse of almost every athletic team in the school sounds difficult, but works out perfectly in this situation. Alex the Trainer is a contact for any and all athletes in need of his assistance, he has several fans inside and outside of the athletic community and has contacts in the BHS superfans. If we approached him with the new “standard BHS water bottle” we could sell it to him wholesale to distribute or we could use his contact list in the form of both popular student-athletes or teachers to get the word out.

Our team of sellers does not exactly consist of the most outgoing individuals, and selling these bottles to students has proved harder than we thought. If we can brand our bottles as the “standard” design for the school and then sell them to athletic administrators or coaches, people who students will follow and listen to, we could find success. We have been approaching this from the ground-level, which is most likely from the wrong angle, if we set up our supply at the top of the ladder, selling down will be much easier.

The End is Nigh, Time to Buck Up

This week kicked off our group’s selling period. The large shipment of bottles had arrived the day before winter vacation, leaving us no time to begin selling until school got back under way. Now that we had the order, the next step was getting the word out to the masses that we had a product they wanted, a task that turned out to be more difficult than we had predicted. As means of advertising we enlisted the skills of one of our group members, who has some remedial talent in graphic design, to create a flyer, in tandem with this we planned to spread the news of the products availability by word of mouth, both through a school-wide announcement as well as each team member being a spokesperson in their day-to-day schedule.

Our group feel short of operating at the great capacity it once did as we were a bit too lenient with the style of this class. Half of our team would go upstairs to work on the flyer every day, when all we needed was the one student who had the graphic design skills. Several class days were spent working on the flyer instead of using other means to spread the word. While I stayed behind in the class to handle any writing assignments or administrative stuff, we had more people than we needed working on a single task. This mistake ultimately falls on my shoulders, being the project manager I should have directed them to a better use of their time, but they told me they were putting themselves to good use so I allowed it. This would have been fine had the flyer done its job and attracted enough traffic to make up for all the days spent not selling, but alas, generating business is more difficult than we imagined.

While the flyer looked nice, it had one gaping flaw, students were instructed to fill out the flyers with contact information as a signal of interest, but we left no contact information of our own. With no way to relay their interest to us, the several students that we may have reached would immediately lose interest. Our product is not exciting or groundbreaking enough to cause such a wanting in a student that they would go out of their way to find the seller and make the purchase. So we spent a week of our precious time to ultimately put out a message that will fall on possibly eager ears with no way to respond, leaving us deaf to any interest there may be in the halls of BHS.

The time to sell our product is coming to a close and I am feeling a pressure unlike that I have felt from a school project before. With real money at stake, it is no longer just a bad grade that threatens if we fail. I divulged in this blog several weeks ago that I was happy and proud to be the leader of such a in-sync group, but, as I am slowly learning, you can not leave a group of smart and able-bodied students to a task without direction for very little will get done. In the coming week I will be tightening my grip on how we spend our time. This project is a true test to see if we have what it takes to pursue the world of business and I am not about to be defeated by wasted time and a few set backs. We’re going to sell these bottles if its the last thing we do.