the sales are all staged right?
totalwise
Posts: 1,418 Forum Member
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the items they produce are not really sold to the retaiers? it's just a hypotethical sale isnt it?
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totalwise
Posts: 1,418 totalwise
Posts: 1,418 totalwise
Posts: 1,418
Comments
They've done shopping channel tasks in the past where the candidates go on air for real, so they will get seen by some people.
It is NOT . Everything is NOT staged .
Has anyone actually seen those videos or the teams' youtube channels?
Wouldn't we have got wind of them even before the series was broadcast?
Ask any of the entrepeneurs that come on dragons den with board games... They have presented far better games and they cant get them retailed because it is literally impossible to arrange a meeting to pitch the product, and even if so, it it would be unlikely that the retailer would place an order if there is no a huge promotion behind it.
That is the problem with The Apprentice, it aims to be a true reflection of the entrepeneraul/business world and it is only partially. The tasks are simply simulations of what happens in the real world, but it is impossible to detach the fact that it is a TV program, hence the access that they have to resources, retailers, contacts... etc. is just unimaginble for any new entrepeneur.
If something decent comes up then it has to be taken outside of the Beeb and worked on. Bodyrocker being the best example.
GeoKnow has potential.
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This.
As Dission says, the show warps reality - not to stage everything but to create a simulation of business that works as a one-hour TV show.
A lot of stuff is set up for the candidates in the background - some of which is mentioned openly in voiceover, some of which is kept quiet so we don't disrupt the magic of TV. Examples:
- Sales appointments/pitches with major retailers are set up in advance. This is stated openly. It's not easy getting these appointments in real life. Retail buyers don't just accept any request, particularly from small start-ups 99% of whom aren't suitable. Some retailers do have 'open days', where anyone can pitch up and be seen by someone in the buying team - that's a reflection of how difficult it is for any seller to get in at any other time.
- Orders placed on QVC, views on YouTube, market stall sales, anything where the buying process is 'live' are real. Pitches for orders are generally not. Would Toys R Us, with 90+ stores, place a real order for a board game for just 60 units? Of course not. In reality they wouldn't have seen the teams anyway. Also, think about it, if they had seen them and placed an order it would have been enough to place a few pieces on the shelves of each store - probably at least 500.
- Where we see teams rocking up to market stalls, this is all pre-arranged by the production team. You don't just suddenly open a coffee cart in central London and start selling. You need a licence from the local council.
- We sometimes wonder why teams didn't try to make X product or use Y name for their brand. That's often because they're steered or restricted by the task rules. This is for either logistical purposes (the production team needs to set up manufacturing, relevant focus groups etc, so you need to constrain choice to make it possible) or for legal reasons (teams' product names have to go through a legal checking process to ensure they're not infringing on anyone else's name or design).
Many other examples, but hopefully you get my point.
and given we never see most of these sorts of products on ebay etc i'd say while they produce x units physically they're 'sold' but the production company keeps them as probably most of the stuff would be illegal to sell or certainly would cause enough to get a few court cases
Where it's a bit less clear is when teams pitch already finished products to retailers. In some (not all) cases, I believe show orders became real commercial purchases, although again there would be a degree of due diligence in the background before a genuine order was placed. I can't remember when it was shown, but there was a folding, inflatable child's car seat (was it Susan Ma's team in the Paris task?) that was pitched at one point and is now commonly available for sale in the UK. I have one!
I remember two years ago ASDA placed an order of one the teams' cookies. They were in stored for a while following the emssion of the program.
Without TV, those cookies would have never gone onto one of those shelfs, it is then a little bit misleading to say in the boardroom "the product is so good that they placed an order..." . Also I remember that during the pitch Jin jedy mentioned 'we'll get the cookies endoresed by Harry Potter as part of our Marketing campaign'., and they were like " ah ok, we will place an order then"
It would be more 'real' to simply say "well I think you should place an order cos there wont be needed any marketing campagin since all this is being filmed and will be broadcasted on national TV with 4m. vieweres... what a better marketing campagin than that..." I wonder if one day we will see an apprentice saying something along those lines, it would be funny, but I suspect that if after 12 years no one has, it is because they have strict rules from the production team.
I wrote at the time that Jim got away with absolute murder on that one. To close the sale he started pulling rabbits out of hats left, right and centre, making promises for multi-million pound marketing campaigns that (a) he would never have to deliver and (b) made no economic sense whatsoever. I'd love to have seen the business plan for the Harry Potter-backed TV campaign to drive sales of yet another biscuit brand in a crowded market - and a cheap-as-chips budget brand with no premium sales value whatsoever. It would have been a licence to burn £20 notes ...
I used to work for one of Asda's rivals, and I can just picture the reaction of the category buyers there if someone had pulled a stunt like that in the real world - Jim would have been out on his ear and no one would have ever taken a meeting with him again. Credibility is everything, and Jim's offer had none.
True, we need a back to basics task .
Of course all the tasks are only a tiny reflection of what actually goes on in the real world of business .
Look at the coach trip task . Did they deduct the cost of hiring a coach, driver and cost of fuel for a day from each teams final total? I don't think they did .
I think they did then, but have since been taken down, like the apps in Series 7.
The guy had something though
https://uk.linkedin.com/pub/jim-eastwood/32/a4b/9a3
That describes Jim as a 'runner-up'. Is that an accurate term? He was a finalist, certainly, but I always consider 'runner-up' to mean the person who came in second place, and that was Helen.
Don't they just have to decide if the product is
rubbish
something which has some potential
rather a good idea
brilliant?
And then adjust their sales offer - so that the team they thought was best gets more orders?
Or do the rules say they have to decide on the first team as soon as they have seen it?
I suppose there's a problem in that the order we see them go in at the interview stage isn't always the order they went in. That means there would be a problem if they said they were third or 4th . If you made the final you wouldn't want to be called a finalist as everyone who went home in week one also claims to have been a finalist. Thats inevitable, as being an also ran who left early , but beat 10, 000 people to get in, reads strangely on your CV. Series 7 is odd too - because there are 4 people left in the for the last decision stage - not the usual 2 in previous years. .
Its a bit of a stretch, but the alternative "finalist" doesn't tell you if he came 16th or 3rd. I hadn't noticed he went to Harvard either.......
For the prearranged appointments I would have thought the former. The latter doesn't really make any sense. There have been episodes in previous series where a team has won partly by virtue of being first through the door, but IIRC that was in a situation where the teams had independently identified the same buyer. Come to think of it we haven't seen any of that this series and I seem to remember it being fairly commonplace in the past,
How many times has the order changed? I know James and Paul were switched in Series 1, but as far as I am aware that was the only time. Doesn't necessarily mean it has never happened since though.
I would say that a 'participant' is someone who made the final cut of candidates. A 'finalist' got to the final week, and a 'runner-up' is the person who came second. (Of course, on most series there aren't any finalists who are not also runner-up or winner).