Five people. Five busy jobs. Five relationships – spouses, significant others, pets. Five schedules of demanding classes. Five homes spread across metro Atlanta.
One group presentation.
At Portfolio Center, crazy situations like this happen. Five people without a single common minute in the day are to come together and work on a group project and deliver a professional presentation before a professional panel.
However, we had one extra variable. Alas, we had one group member with a very pregnant wife and a half finished house full of contractors. In the final days before our presentation we knew we had a lot of work ahead of us, but struggled with our different schedules and locales. We could have given our very busy member an absentee pass considering the circumstances, but our loyal member wanted to remain involved in between doctors appointments and housing dilemmas.
So what do you do with a member who has a wife days from giving birth and a house full of construction workers? Easy. Move in with him.
Yes, we moved in, pets and all. Those who lived furthest away showered, slept, and borrowed pre-pregnancy clothes and shoes from our host. A pull-out sofa and picnic table outback provided a place when fatigue overcame us. Take-out, Pirate’s Booty, and Starbucks became our regular diet. And somehow amongst barking dogs, sweaty construction workers, and a very pregnant wife, a marketing plan was born.
As for all this started -this quarter 10 students were given the opportunity to take a class called Marketing for Designers. For many in the creative field, the idea of taking a marketing class sends shivers, but fortunately we were given freedom to make the best of it.
Our class was divided into two groups and given the task to present a marketing plan for a new fictitious Proctor & Gamble product. In 45 minutes we were to pitch a new Crest product for cleaning teeth on the go: a small capsule that dissolves in the mouth, all natural, small pellet size. We could change the name (it was introduced to us a Crest-On-The-Go) and market it any way we saw fit, as long as we had a strong objective with strategies and tactics to back it up.
In our research, we looked into the way the day is used, divided and spent and the opportunities P&G was missing. We analyzed the typical shelf space for Crest and studied their color pallets and packaging. We attempted to create a sub brand for Crest, kind of a Mini Cooper for BMW, in an attempt to appeal to Generation Y. We called our product Re*fresh and added a new logo instead of using that of the dated Crest. We didn’t want to get away from the reputation of Crest, yet we wanted a fresh look to attract the huge dispensable income of the upcoming ginormous group of consumers, Generation Y.
We struggled much in the beginning, as establishing a unified objective and strategies among us provided to be quite difficult. We bribed my boss from Kimberly-Clark – senior designer for the Innovation Design departments, and also an industrial designer to shed some light on how to successfully market a new product with a creative mind. Over lunch they shared an immeasurable amount of advice and inspired us to get on the ball.
Through challenging one another, doing immeasurable amounts of research, and spending too much time in a small space together, we made out plan come together in the end. We managed to conduct video interviews with our target market, fit in a photo shoot for our ad campaign, and create three forms of packaging mock-ups. We each used our strengths to make our presentations come alive, weather it be in public speaking, making keynote charts, or comping last minute designs.
Our instructor, posing as the CMO of P&G, wanted a surprise at our presentation and did not want to see any of our work throughout the quarter…we hope we gave him something to enjoy, as we definitely gave ourselves something to remember.
The expecting
Lunch with the fine folks from Kimberly-Clark
Confidential Dog
Testing the competition
Re*fresh logo
Poster #1
Poster #2
Poster #3
Billboard #1
Billboard #2
Bebo Site
YouTube Contest Ad
YouTube Contest Page
Ad for business class (future Gen Y)
Shelf mock-up
Packaging concept sketches (sorry, I don’t have pics of the final comps)
World reknown dentist, Dr. Yuri Zhopov
Gen Y tells all!
A few minutes with a corporate bigshot and his thoughts on dental care
Our P&G work padges
After Party
