Did anyone see the Apprentice on the 17th February? It was so good. Absolutely love Lord Alan Sugar, who turned up in his own bespoke black POD. The current candidates taking part in this new series learn this time round that they must gear up to design, brand and pitch their own electric driverless POD. They also need to pitch their newly design pods to major corporate clients such as Network Rail, Urban Airport & the NEC all of whom have million-pound budgets to lease driverless vehicles. The two teams called ‘Diverse’ and ‘Infinity’ are given the orders that whichever team makes the biggest overall sales will drive away with the win. The team that sells less PODs, well, unfortunately one of them will be fired.
When it came to advertising and marketing experience within the team there was one volunteer Akshay Thakrar of team ‘Diversity’ who put his hand up to be PM. Whilst Akshay and Kathryn Burn went to town on designing their pod it was quite clear that no one had done any real market research on what their clients really needed. This led to having no specific ideas what the final design POD would represent & the real target market the POD was going to be sold to. The Graphic Designers time whilst on set was mainly taken up with trying to put different types of stars on the vehicle, instead of being given a full design brief. During the design process the amazing Baroness Karen Brady described their POD “as looking like a toaster that was going to explode.”
The other team namely Brittany Carter and Aaron Willis decided to design their POD branding as sustainable and pure – BEEPURE. The POD had a design of leaves & sunflowers alongside some bees. As was pointed out by Tim Cambell the leaf was yellow instead of green, the blue was meant to be water (but no water was incorporated into the design) and in a nutshell a total branding mishmash. The finalised design also caused issues with the rest of the team who thought the design should have been more simplistic.
In the final sales pitch most of the buyers were saying that both PODs had a limited market within their current design scope. However, team ‘Infinity’ raised £1,262,000 of sales, whereas Team ‘Diversity’ only managed to raise £535,000 of sales.
In the boardroom, you can see that Lord Sugar is driven to distraction, leading him to hit the brakes as one particular candidate Sophie Wilding is told, ‘You’re fired!’ Cant wait for next weeks episode then go to BBC Iplayer at https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0014jxp/the-apprentice-series-16-7-pods, image courtesy of BBC.