Week 6

Phone Soap

The focus of the classes this week was primarily on the product Phone Soap as seen on Shark Tank. The product is a charger that also uses UV light to get 99.9% of bacteria off of a consumers phone.

The way phone soap works can be seen through the video above. It shows how the phone will be cleaned and charged within a 5 minute period and how you are able to switch out chargers to accommodate different phones or tablets.

One thing we focused on in class that was noted in the Shark Tank episode was who the market of this product would be? Is this product a Business to Business (B2B) Product or a Business to Consumer (B2C) Product? The Sharks were split in the decision with some of the sharks opting out of the deal do to this specific reason. 

The Business to Business side of it was seen by Mark Cuban. He saw the potential for the product to be put into hospitals to be able to sanitize them after seeing the sick. The fact that people were concerned with all the germs of a hospital he saw as a selling point and could be able to market it to sell it to the medical facilities.

On the opposite side with Business to Consumer, Lori Greiner saw high hopes in selling it on QVC. The creators of phone soap had already noted that their largest buyers were desk workers that were able to clean their phone while doing work in the office. Lori thought that was also their largest sellers and that putting it on QVC would get the word out more and hope to advertise it better. This helped to teach the importance of figuring out what type of product you have and where your specific market is.

Smart Project

For our smart project we had to finalize our last design as to what we are going to be doing. We to combine two of our original designs to be able to have both a dead bolt that would keep the door open if the key is left behind and also a weighted sensor to alert them if the key is still on the hook. The final design can be seen to the left.

Along with this we have a meeting scheduled to be able to get key advice from a senior marketing major. She will be able to help us with logos, colors, advertisements, and making sure we know exactly where we want to market the product to. That also goes back to what we discussed before with the B2B or B2C products. I feel this product could easily be a B2B product and we could sell it to colleges to be able to put in dorm rooms. We will have to talk it over as a group but will keep refining our product in the next weeks.