Author: ariobarzann2019

Ario Winter Market Reflection PMSS Vulcan 18-12-2019

Step 1: Describe your experience.

During the market my partner, Leo, and I sold Lava lamps that could come with any color. We sold two types of jars, jars that had a double sealed lid and ones that had a single lid. We decided to sell Lava Lamps because we understood that in the real market, the companies that made them sold them for a very high price. We also understood that people wouldn’t buy from these companies because of their high price and the fact that their lava lamps were rare to come by. The market was really challenging for us because of our high cost of $70.37 and the fact that people weren’t really interested in buying our product. The thing that saved us from losing money in the end was good networking which helped us break even. In the end we were trying to get rid of our products so we sold them for really cheap because we didn’t want to take any of them home.

Step 2: Examine your experience. 

A lot of academic concepts came into play during the market such as  our marketing strategies and networking with customers. We needed to understand the supply and demand laws to see how many products we needed to make and what price we had to sell them for. We marketed our company using social media and posters. We also had a visual advertisement running constantly on a computer. Our networking skills really saved us since we were able to network in at least half of our customers. We had to do accounting and finance which were also an area of business that we learned. We had to change our approach after we received new information during the market by hearing our customer complaints and suggestions.  We changed how our table looked and made it look simpler so that it was more easily approachable to customers and that it would be easier to put it up and then take it down. We lowered the price day by day whenever we saw our customer numbers dwindling. This experience differed from what we thought would happen because initially we thought that the money was going to come in really quickly as the consumers saw how cheap our lava lamps were but in reality people thought the price was high. This made us change our goal of making at least $20 of profit to just breaking even because we were afraid that we were going to lose money. The thing that I enjoyed most was making a sale during the market and the thing that I enjoyed least was going into the crowd trying to get a customer which is what I was doing most of the time. The reason that I spent a lot of time trying to draw people from the crowd was because I believed that the product isn’t going to sell itself and you need someone to sell it.

Step 3: Articulate Learning.

I learned many things during the sale such as how to deal with customers, how to network to people you don’t know, how to come up with a good sales pitch, how to apply marketing strategies efficiently and how to change the price of the product during the right time. I learned all of these things mostly through failure and I was not discouraged if we had low sales and if we ever had low sales, I would let that motivate me to do better and to fix my mistakes and improve. Learning to talk to customers came with experience and at the end I was better at pitching a sale to them compared to the start of the market. Networking was pretty easy and I learned how to do it by getting a group of my friends to buy my product and for them to get their friends to do the same and this was a very effective tactic since it helped us break even. Coming up with a good sales pitch also came with experience and my way of doing it was to remind the consumer of what they don’t have and what they could have if I could come up with a quick example of this it would be to ask the consumer to wipe some spilled water off a table which the consumers response would be that they don’t have tissue which then I would say well there ya go here is a reason for you to buy this brand new flower smelling bag of tissues. To apply marketing strategies we had to try them and see if they worked or not in trial and error. We did this by trying each strategy that we knew on one customer and at the end checked to see which strategy worked best. Changing the price of products also came with experience since we realized using our other strategies that our demand was low so we didn’t need to have a high price and we adjusted our price according to this throughout the whole market. All of these things matter because these can help me in the future if I wanted to start a successful business. In the future I think that more important strategies should be used and the less important ones shouldn’t be used and I think that digital marketing was much less important than networking because in digital marketing you are just trying to get the eye of a consumer but in networking you are trying to convince them to buy your product.

Core Competency (Critical Thinking)

I picked this as my core competency because I know that my team lacked on the creative side and in the end we produced a product that we weren’t really happy with but we were using our marketing strategies to sell. My team and I used logic to help us and at times I saved us by coming up with a good plan or fixing a problem quickly. There was a lot of critical thinking involved around for our product because other groups vendors would just stand around and wait for a customer to come in because they either knew there product was going to sell very well or they knew that their cost was low and they didn’t need to worry about breaking even. For my group it was much bigger of a challenge and our critical thinking is what saved us from losing money. This is because we had  a high cost due to the fact that we needed to make a specific number of products and that we had a poor product that people weren’t really interested. I used my critical thinking by always actively trying to think of new ways to drive more customers in and trying different sales pitches to get a customer to buy our product so that we could break even. I would say that our group had a handicap but our logic saved us. We were also very well organized as well and knew  were everything belonged and how to pack up efficiently and this was because we had planned these things out before the market had happened.

Our stand and our product