I really thought from watching the show and how well 2 of the pitches went down that the Professional Woman cookbook would of got more sales, it didn't sound that bad an idea and that Maria did have a point that they already have loads of general cookbooks and standing out would be a good thing. She got a bit of a hard time for that but to be honest it wasn't the worst idea to think that. I didn't think they did anything that wrong and heard worse pitches in the adult version.

I guess the others book was more creative though and unique which gave it the edge but that was niched to students so Alan Sugar's theory saying these companies don't want niched books didn't really make sense.

The other book was niche in two ways - it was aimed at professionals, and it was aimed at women. Professionals makes sense, that's a target market with a specific set of needs - fast and nutritious. Women, um, what is a woman-specific dish? It's needlessly reducing the potential market in a way that makes no sense.

It wasn't the worst idea ever, although clearly it would have been better if they hadn't needlessly narrowed the target market to just women. (And 'women' is hardly niche ...)

As Maria attempted - reasonably - to point out, she shouldn't have been crucified for having an idea that turned out to be bad if the team had come up with no viable alternatives. Although she does need to learn to dial it down and give others a chance to speak up. A strong PM would have created space for quieter members of the team to contribute.

Maria did redeem herself somewhat with a very strong pitch. On the other team, Navdeep was also excellent although we saw less of her - as evidenced by the fact she secured orders from all three retailers.

I also made the point that a student-targeted cookbook is also rather niche in my recap (link below). Sugar's statement that it's better to appeal to as wide a market as possible was a sweeping generalisation. It's a reasonable rule of thumb for mass-market products, but all cookbooks are targeted in some way: by type of cuisine, for bakers, for vegetarians etc. And 'niche' brands like Ferrari do rather well too!

http://slouchingtowardsthatcham.com/...-for-disaster/

two great answers, yeah I guess meals for women is a bit silly I kind of though it meant meals for busy single women to create quick when they get home, when I think about it more is a little mad to limit yourself to just women in this busy professional ain't got long to cook but want something nice, they should of gone more into the quick and healthy dishes for the busy professionals more.

It is a little annoying you don't always see everything, yeah didn't show too much of the pitches of the where's mummy cookbook team so you didn't have much to really fall back on when they won, only the spelling was brought up, surely these retailers must of said spelling bad but oh this is really what we are looking for, love this concept, didn't go much into positives about it.

It did it last week to , didn't show much of the girls selling so you were left thinking, how did they win thinking they didn't sell much when clearly they must of sold lots.

Always the way, sadly. Once you've cut out the 'previously' recap, the task brief and then the boardroom scenes, we only ever see about 25 minutes of actual task. I've read they shoot over 100 hours of footage per episode, so it's inevitable we only see a small portion of what happens - and that's heavily edited to shape the narrative of that particular episode which means we often don't get to see a lot of the good things candidates do - or the bad things that the winning team does.

For instance, think what would have happened if Platinum had lost. Maria would have been praised for having the courage of her convictions with her (flawed) concept, while Platinum would have been absolutely hammered for conducting NO research at all.

I agree with trollface. The target market of professionals was narrowed down enough for the concept to work. Going further and targeting women was a bad idea as they were limiting their market down too much, not to mention it contradicted a pretty comprehensive market research group.

I do think that Odyssey were sunk the moment the target markets were established. Steven came up with a great idea although I didn't like the name (I'm a student and I don't think I'd buy a cookbook called #Where's Mummy?). The good thing about student cookbooks is that even if they haven't cooked before in their life, students will still buy them as they think they'll need them and Steven came up with a great niche.

Don't mean to be rude to Ashleigh, Amy, Alice and Lucy but, I think Steven and Navdeep could have single-handedly won the task last night.

I think they pretty much did win it single-handedly (or should that be double-handedly?)

Yeah Steven could be a dark horse, hasn't shown to much of him yet, don'y really remember him last week to be honest. I also think Navdeep will be one to watch, seems like a clever girl.

He was the highest seller for the boys last week and was quite astute. I think it is telling that a lot of viewers don't remember him. As I mentioned in another thread, I wonder if his good skills haven't played up because he becomes an early casualty?

Navdeep didn't impress me Week 1, but she really impressed me last night. Calm, fair and delivered three excellent pitches - she's one to watch.

I think aside from the rather pointless limitation of the target audience to woman, the losing team's cookbook was a little bland.

On another note, it was amusing when Maria had a tantrum about the sub team's feedback from the focus group claiming that they were not listening and being babies - talk about ironic.

Most winners only really start being featured prominently around the middle of the series. That he's good but this hasn't been remarked on could be an indication that he is the winner.

But the team did come up with one - it seemed that in the focus group, the boys were given the feedback that they had a good idea to pitch the book for the "professional" market, which they were willing to work with but pitching it to "professional women" was too narrow a market, but was what Maria wanted.

She shouldn't have been crucified for having an idea that turned out to be bad, but she should be crucified for having an idea that turned out to be bad because she ignored all the feedback from the focus group, ignored other people in the team and steamrolled her idea through.