Tag Archives: Mona Lewis

Selling Margate

Sometimes Sir Alan fires people for the task, other times he goes for someone on his list of weak candidates. This week it was definitely a chance for him to get rid of a weak candidate – and he was faced with a choice of two letting the real guilty party off.

The task was to rebrand Margate, creating a poster campaign and leaflet, and then presenting the campaign firstly to industry experts, and then to the people of Margate.

Both teams split themselves with two putting the materials together back in London, and two on the ground in Margate gathering market research and taking the pictures for the campaign materials. To be honest it looked like Empire were doomed from the start. This was clearly a creative task, and Ignite had Yasmina and Kate, both of whom had done well in previous creative tasks – Empire appeared to be sorely lacking in creative talent. They had the double problem of having Debra who seemed to have decided that she was going to be in charge, and bulldozing her way through all opposition.

The teams went for clearly different angles. Ignite opted to sell Margate as a traditional family resort, highlighting activities for all the family, whereas Empire thought that repackaging the town as a LGTB was the way to go, with the notable exception of Mona who suggested a family theme similar to Ignite.

It’s fair to say that whilst the LGTB theme produced a number of cringe making moments – in particular Tanzanian born Mona totally mishandling a conversation with a pre-op male to female transsexual – neither idea was a turn off for the industry experts or the locals. Despite initial misgivings in conducting the market research Mona found that many locals were already aware of a small LGTB in the town.

Therefore it all came down to execution, and in team Empire, this was an ongoing battle as Howard repeatedly tried and failed to get Debra to produce what was needed. Sadly, much as happened last week, Debra bulldozed through his objections, producing posters that looked more like leaflets, and with a font choice that was appalling – not quite Comic Sans, but pretty close, and a whole look that Beth described as something her students might coble together rather than something for a professional marketing campaign. To cap it all off her time management went out of the window and she left too little time to finish the leaflet, resulting in large amounts of empty space, a mistake she further compounded by lying in the presentation and saying that it was a deliberate idea to include local business advertising – a ploy the industry experts saw through immediately.

Whilst there were issues with the Ignite campaign, it was streaks ahead of what Empire produced. The posters had a consistent design, and a clear message, the leaflet was finished, and the presentation was good. So it wasn’t a surprise at all when Ignite were declared the winner.

The boardroom call-back was clearly down to tactics. Had Debra brought back Howard, then the discussion would end up being about the disagreements over the posters and leaflets where she had continually and incorrectly overruled Howard. Instead she brought back Mona and James, both of whom are seen as weak candidates who have escaped the boardroom so far, even taking into account Mona coming out on top in the sales task last week.

I’m absolutely clear that on the basis of this task Debra was the main person to blame, she bulldozed all opposition and what was presented was her design, and it sucked, however she presented Sir Alan with Mona and James, one of whom has been pretty quiet over the weeks, and the other who was described by Sir Alan himself last week as a village idiot.

Here it was very much that Sir Alan was presented with one of the people who he didn’t think was the right fit, so he took the opportunity to get rid of her – definitely a lucky escape for Debra…

Of course if you want to see a professional re-branding, check out this effort to re-brand somewhere else:

Product, Product, Product

It never fails to amaze me how many Apprentice candidates seem to think they can sell ice to Eskimos, but fail to get the basics right in picking the right product, for the right customer. This week with Sir Alan having set up pitches with a high class designer store and a long established hardware store, one team pitched a two person dog lead and an expensive cross between a sleeping bag and a jump suit, and the other a cat playground that was just a painted cardboard box and a one sided bicycle pannier that almost everybody said would unbalance the bike. Of the four products, only the one sided bicycle pannier sold, and that was a small number to the designer store on looks alone.

What that did do though, is level the playing field. With four poor product choices, and minimal sales to the potential big prospects, it came down to a battle of the salespeople, a chance to find out who was all mouth, and who had the potential.

After some team swapping, and based on the previous bravado, Ignite were in a strong position, they had Kate who has been a strong candidate so far, with Phil and Ben neither of whom have been shy in telling everybody what strong candidates they are. They also had Lorraine who whilst she seriously rubs people up the wrong way at times has consistently been right, and Yasmina. Facing them were Debra who also talks up her talents in sales, but was on a final warning from last week, along with Howard who we’ve barely seen, Mona who badly mismanaged the first task and survived by the skin of her teeth, and James who Sir Alan described as the village idiot last week.

Unlike previous selling tasks, every candidate had their own individual order book, and all but three managed to sell, those three, well the problem was pretty apparent…

The double whammy here is that or weeks, Phil has been in conflict with Lorraine, and from the moment she put herself forward as project manager, you could see the general laid back attitude to the whole task, so confident that if they lost the task, as project manager Lorraine would be shown the door.

However as always, it comes down to the boardroom. Things kept coming back to the lack of orders, so Phil tries to highlight his previous success – the selling task last week where he made a loss but won by default, and ignored repeated suggestions from Lorraine that the rug was worth a lot more than he thought, and then Nick brought up Pants Man from the week before. Amazingly at this point, Sir Alan still seems to be wavering towards Lorraine, so she plays the relationship card and mentions that she believes the relationship between Phil and Kate has affected the task. At this point Kate defends herself, and just for good measure sticks the knife into Phil. With that, Phil is gone, and certainly in this house and I’m sure a good few others we’re mightily pleased he’s gone.

What follows now of course is the massive effort to rebuild a reputation, so on You’re Fired we had humble Phil who plays down his talents, agrees with the comments made about him and is even vaguely complimentary about Lorraine, something that continues in his exit interview.

That leaves one other of the trinity of failure this week, Ben (who got a scholarship to Sandhurst don’t you know). Had it not been for the whole Phil and Kate thing, he would almost certainly have been in the firing line. Despite all his comments about his sales ability he flopped totally, he was just lucky that he failed along with Phil and Kate, and thanks to that and the ongoing arguing between Phil and Lorraine, he could take a bit of a back seat. Had he been in the boardroom after his spectacular loss last week, and a singular inability to sell this week, it certainly would have been a difficult one for him to talk his way out of, in much the same way as Phil was a strong candidate to be shown the door once he was picked. The interesting battle of course would have been Phil and Ben – but it might well have been a battle where Lorraine went down in the crossfire…

Pants

Some teams are just unmanageable. The divisions in Ignite that we saw last week came even more to the fore this week as Kimberly – an early favourite in some quarters to win – struggled to keep the all out war between bulldozer Philip and Lorraine in check. The problem was that the two of them came up with two lousy ideas. Although Philip bulldozed his idea over Lorraine, it is worth highlighting that her idea diverged from the project brief anyway in that it had multiple characters – the brief called for a single character – but with the two of them going for each other it just seemed to deadlock the rest of the team, rather than binning both ideas, they ended up running out of time and having to pick the least bad of the two, losing time and sanity in the process, and leaving them with no time for the vital box design.

The fundamental problem is that with this battle going on within the team, and continuing into subsequent days for someone who is about quiet, co-operative management, it is impossible to handle, and ends up being like a cancer eating away at the team. In the real world, you’d probably be able to work around such a conflict, but in the world of the Apprentice you’re doomed, and it really comes down to salvaging what you can from the task, and playing the boardroom right.

For the first part, salvaging the task, Kimberly seemed to play it right. After the catastrophe of the first day, she took control of the advert, and received a lot of praise for the result, she also seemed to be lining Philip up for the fall by letting him do the jingle. As an aside, Beth reckoned this sequence produced one of the best lines of the night, when the chap in the recording studio comments on how Philip sounds…

She then hands off the presentation to Mona, who makes an utter hash of it telling the client about the product rather than the campaign. However Lorraine starts to mess things up when it gets to the boardroom.

Within moments Lorraine is making her points, attacking Kimberly and distracting from Philip. At one point Sir Alan clearly points the finger at Philip, but taken by surprise by the turn around from Lorraine, Kimberly who has more than once in previous tasks protected her, ends up focusing some of the boardroom rhetoric there, instead of highlighting how Philip bulldozed any other ideas, and laying the blame squarely at his door. As a result it is Kimberly who takes the taxi ride, and Philip gets let off, despite the whole concept coming down to him. Really I think Kimberly was probably the only one worth keeping, and both Philip and Lorraine shown the exit.

Meanwhile, over on the other team, for once we had a great example of a well managed team, that pulled together. The initial idea was good, and although the advert was a classic example of a ropey Apprentice commercial, the team worked well together, and it was clear from pretty early on who was going to win. Certainly on this performance Kate has to be a favourite for overall winner, although the clips on You’re Fired showing her getting friendly with Philip does possibly count against her…

Next week though we do get a chance to mix things up again, with a new twist on the shopping list task. Rather than trying to buy a list of items for the best price, the teams are being given ten items to sell. As always with those tasks the devil is in the detail, and knowing your items is key. You can be certain that Sir Alan will have put some gotcha items in there, and I’m sure we’re going to see some of the candidates mess up spectacularly as a result.