Week 9

Because of Spring Break, there was no blog post last week, but we are jumping right back into things!

This Tuesday, instead of having a conventional class meeting, Professor Spotts took the time to meet with each SMART Project Group individually.  We went over our updated surveys and discussed how to improve them. Wit his feedback, my team made changes to our survey, which included cutting, changing, adding, and altering the order of the questions.  Because none of the members of our team is of legal age to go to the bars to ask these questions, we may take our Marketing Consultant up on her offer to help us.  Our team would be held responsible for going to restaurant-bars, while she would go to bars.  During our 25 minute meeting, Professor Spotts also urged us to create another survey for those people of age who go to bars. This would help us understand how the customers of the bar feel about our product, and if they would keep supporting the bars if they were implemented.

Some of our Patron Survey Questions are as follows:


In what ways do you think this product will affect you or your friends and family? Positive or negative? Please explain.

If this was a required process by the venue of your social gathering, would your feelings toward the product change in any way? Please explain.

If bars implanted this product into their venue, would you change the location of your future gathering?

Would this product make you feel agitated? Or would it make you feel safe?

If this product was available as a rental, for house parties and small gatherings, would you take the tie to rent a product like this, as the host, and not the guest?



This Thursday, we spent the class talking about what we had read in Chapter 19, and related it back to our SMART Project. We talked about a bunch of important questions about pricing, and saw how multiple terms from the textbook could be used to aid each group's product.  Some of the questions were as follows:

How Price sensitive do you think your target customer will be?

I believe that our customers will not be price sensitive(elastic), as the value of product may outweigh the price. Because our product is saving lives, an increase in price might not be a big deal to bars. Also, if some sort of regulation was put in place that required a product like this, the product price could definitely increase.

How might 2 Part Pricing be used?

2 Part Pricing could be implemented by having one cost for the actual product and another separate cost for the installation of the product.  Likewise, wee could also charge for the training of the employees; they would need to be taught how to enforce the safety of a product like this.

Discuss how you might use discounts, allowances, or rebates.

In our case, a seasonal discount could apply for our rentals.  Assuming most people will rent our product during the holidays and graduation parties, it is possible to decrease the price during off-season(or not peak times)

Should your SMART Project team pursue a profits, sales, or status-quo pricing objective?

It would be in the best interest of our SMART Project team to pursue a profits pricing objective. Since we do not have direct competition and our main goal is not to gain market share, it would not make sense to pursue a sales or status-quo pricing objective.

These questions, among others, are important to think about regarding the next step for our SMART Projects.