Week of January 11: $200 Project

This project for us was not as successful as we anticipated. It attribute that mostly to our projections about what would sell and what wouldn’t We had thought that Freshmen and Seniors would be good targets for these bracelets. Seniors because we are almost out of Brookline High and a lot of us are going to miss our high school days and want some memento. We chose freshmen as well because they are new to the school and excited to finally enter into the world of a high school student. What we didn’t take into account was the fact that we didn’t know who any freshman were and when we did happen to find one they never had any money with them or any interest in the bands. It was easy for us to sell to seniors. We, for the most part, knew who was in our grade and because of this we could pull the friend card and they would buy it from us because they knew us. It was also easier to sell in our classes as they mostly consist of seniors and we know them. We had great success in selling our senior bands as we almost sold out of them, however on the flip side, we barely sold any freshman bands. I think that it was a mix of the design of the bands as well as a lack of understanding our target customer. We couldn’t really adapt as we had already spent our $200 and were stuck with the product we purchased. It was a learning experience for us in the end. We needed to think more about whom we were selling to and what people would be attracted to as far as design. Now that we have been through this project we understand the importance of knowing your customer.          

Chapter 8: Conclusion: Focus, Test, Believe

This last chapter of the book wrapped up the idea of the tipping point. It mainly talked about starting with an issue and the approach on might take to solve it. He brought up a final example of how a nurse wanted to raise awareness of breast cancer in the African American community. She brought about the fact that when African American women lose their hair during the course of treatment, it is difficult for them to find wigs that match their original hair. This little fact, the nurse believed, reached out to people more because it wasn’t throwing facts out like traditional education of the disease. She believed that we people relate they are more likely to respond. Gladwell called this approach a Band-Aid solution as it just attempts to treat the symptom of the problem without actually solving the actual problem. However, relating back to his earlier chapter about the importance of context in every issue, solving a little issue like this can be more affective than one thinks to solve the larger problem. He says that eventually, if there are enough “Band-Aid solutions” for this problem, it can result in a tipping point. I think this chapter summed up the main ideas of the book very well. The whole idea of the tipping point has many aspects that go along with it. The main focus of it is that you need enough positive “advertising” of what you are trying to “sell” to people in order to reach a point that will ultimately “tip” you into success. This doesn’t always necessarily have to relate to business. It can also relate to personal and societal issues that need a solution. I found this book to put an interesting spin on a phenomenon. Gladwell always finds incredibly interesting evidence to support his argument. I love it because it’s not only relatable to the layperson but it also makes for an interesting, though provoking read. All in all I really enjoyed most of this book. At first I thought reading a business book would be boring and difficult to get through but this book was a pretty quick read and it wasn’t at all boring.      

Week of January 4: Hair Salon Storefront Project

This week for our storefront project we are working on finishing parts 4-6 up and re-editing the entire business plan. We are struggling a lot more than anticipated with part 4. This is mainly because of the lack of communication within our group. We initially had a solid part 4 and then it was changed so we had to go in and change parts 5 and 6 again. This posed as a tedious task as re-doing parts 5 and 6 consist of calculations as well as explanations that take a while to complete. Although we have a lot to do, I feel like the spine of this project is really solid. We’ve made our idea into something that seems viable. We made it unique, which at the start of this project it wasn’t really that different from your average salon. I feel confident that by the end of this week we will have a good business plan and something that is worth sharing and presenting. My group and I are actually pretty proud of the work we’ve done. What started as just another project has turned into something that is important to us. When we talk about have we value student education and diversification in comes from truth. Had we actually made this project a reality we would like to see it’s success not only for our own personal satisfaction, but also to further enrich the education of the student interns there and to create a place where a group of people, who hadn’t previously had the option of going to Brookline for hair services, can go. I really found that, aside from the large workload, I actually enjoyed their project. There was an end goal and we knew exactly what we had to do to reach it. While we had some road bumps early on in this project, we figured it out and completed it with a good sense of accomplishment.  

Chatper 6 & 7: Case Study

The first chapter of this two-part story began with stressing the importance of staying true to the branding of your business. Gladwell used Airwalk shoes as an example of the decline of a business due to their switch it branding. He talked about how at first the shoes were almost custom designed to target certain groups of people. There were the “hipster” shoes sold at smaller stores and then “mainstream” shoes sold at larger corporations. This created a double market where they could reach two fairly large groups of customers. Because of this, the successes of their sales were great. However, the decline began when they started to come out with, essentially, one time of shoes that they sold to both markets. People valued their uniqueness and as such didn’t care much for a one-line shoe brand that now didn’t stand out much in the shoe industry. I think the bigger picture of this is that not only companies, but also people, need to stay true to their values. This goes into what the second case study was about. Gladwell talked about how teenagers will mimic the behaviors of people around them. In both cases, it’s about knowing your own beliefs and having the strength to back them when it really counts. Peer pressure and pressure the keep up with the market often times results in the loss of the factor that set you apart from everyone else. Being unique is attractive to a lot of people. It is viewed as almost brave to go against the grain in society and that is why so many people fall into conformity. If everyone acted the same and wanted the same things, the world would be a very dry place. There would be no scintillating conversation or heated debates. Everyone would agree and no one would stand up for “right and wrong”. It’s important to have diversity amongst peers as well as society because when all is said and done you want to have a head on your shoulders that has values that are so deep that even the thought of loosing them is enough to make you fight to keep them.               

Week of December 28: $200 Project

We have received our bracelets and have begun to put them up in the hallways. We have the next two weeks to sell them and have reserved the table in front of the cafeteria to sell them. So far we don’t see as much interest in them as we want to. The design of the bracelet itself is not as visually pleasing as we would have liked. The bands are much too big for the lettering itself. I think that if they were 1/2in bands as opposed to 1in bands, people would be more interested in buying them. Although it is disappointing that the product is not what we initially thought it would be, we will have to work with what we have. I think selling is going to be our biggest obstacle. We have one method of selling, outside the cafeteria, and we have no way of knowing if it is going to be affective or not. For the most part we only notice food products being sold outside the cafeteria. It makes sense, people go there to get food, come out and see a bake sale and automatically go over to see what is being sold. Selling a product unrelated to food, I believe, is going to be a bigger challenge. I don’t think most people will stop by to look so we’re going to have to try to get their attention some other way. So far very little people have been responding to our flyers either by email or the Facebook group. This worries us in that early interest isn’t being showed and we don’t have a huge amount of time to sell. For now it’ll be touch and go and I’m not sure what I anticipate for the overall sale. I would love to say that I see profit, however, I myself would not buy this product so I’m not sure if other people will jump at the idea.   

Chapter 4 & 5: The Power of Context

This chapter talked mainly about how small, seemingly insignificant events relating to an even bigger event can actually affect the larger event more than trying to make a big change. He used the crime rate in New York in the 90s as an example of this. Rather than trying to go around and dramatically change the criminals, they did small things to the community. They would paint over graffiti and go after train hoppers. These small acts allowed the community itself to be safer and cleaner. This way, the atmosphere in which crime was being committed would slowly become less and less of an “ugly” place and crime rates would decrease. I found this chapter to be very intriguing. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense to people as to why they wouldn’t want to attack a problem head on. It confuses them to work around the issue because our human minds think that when something is broken, you have to fix it. With physical objects that may be true, however, in situations like community and relationships, a lot of the time it’s little things that are lacking that disallow the larger things to exist. In relationships, there are often issues in having the same interests. One or both party members might get upset about this constantly and think that the solution is to try and like the same things. While this might work, it is also possible that other shortcomings in the relationship. Lack of effective communication could be an example of this or lack of diversity it the activities that are done with each other. The solution to most problems isn’t always the obvious. Often times it takes perspective, looking at the bigger picture, and realizing that there is more than what was initially thought. When one realizes this, it becomes much easier to fix the problem.