Tutorial work - week1 - Elevator pitch PDF

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Activity Week 2 Elevator Pitch Exercise To prepare for the tutorial activities in Week 2, please watch the following two pitches from Dragons’ Den, a popular Canadian reality TV show (in which entrepreneurs pitch their own businesses to five potential investors for investment), and answer the three questions below. http://www.cbc.ca/dragonsden/pitches/suncoat-products http://www.cbc.ca/dragonsden/pitches/freshnails (You can click on each URL or “copy and paste” it to your web browser) Tutorial Preparation Questions: 1. The two pitches are obviously longer than an elevator ride, covering many important issues of their business/marketing plans. Could you identify the important points on the marketing side and summarize them in a sentence or two. In other words, if you were the one pitching one of the pitches but you only had the time of span of an elevator ride, what would you say? Prepare one “elevator pitch” for each product. You may want to use the following template:

FOR (targe target customers), WHO HAS (customer customer produc productt name) IS A (product product need/want need/want), (produc the key va valu lu luee ). category category) THAT (the competition competition), THE PRODUCT UNLIKE (competition positioning positioning). (positioning Target customers: whom you’ll serve after your decision of market segmentation and target marketing (p.10 of our text) Customer need/want: Want may be more relevant than need here (p.7 of our text) Product name: Suncoat or Freshnails, this is an easy one. After all, it is just a name. Product category: The category gives an important frame of reference for the market (p.9 of our text), as well as competition (Figure 1.2) The key value: this is the customer-perceived value, “the customer’s evaluation of the difference between all the benefits and all the costs of a market offering relative to those of competing offers” (p.15). Note that in an elevator pitch, there is no time to confuse the matter with multiple benefits, which are in the product. To maximize the impact, present the single most compelling reason why a target customer would buy into the idea. Competition: It is easier to identify the most relevant competitor(s) for Suncoat than for Freshnails. That said, Michael Wekerle, one of the five potential investors identified a

Bus 343 Jason Ho

Fall2016 Simon Fraser University

competitor (time: 4:54) and used it as the reason to withdraw from further negotiation with Freshnails. Positioning: How does Suncoat or Freshnails want its brand/product to be known in the minds of the target customers? This may sound a bit overlapping with “the key value”, and it is. While “the key value” part focuses on how the brand fits the need/want of the target customers, the “positioning” bracket here emphasize two other key considerations: how the marketing mix capitalizes on the capabilities of the firm that is superior to those of the competition, and how the product and other marketing mix are something competitors are not able to match, at least in short term (this is indeed the value proposition described on p.11). 2. Do you think the investors (dragons) made the right call to (or not to) invest in Suncoat or Freshnails? If Suncoat and Freshnails could do more research (i.e. finding more convincing evidences) before their pitches, what would you suggest them to do to improve their odds? 3. It is obvious that real pitches like the ones in Dragons’ Den are longer, more conversational, and more unpredictable than an elevator pitch. What would be the value of preparing an elevator pitch using the above template BEFORE the real pitch?

Bus 343 Jason Ho

Fall2016 Simon Fraser University...