Life's a Pitch - SWOT Analysis

Notes from the session

Marketing

• Converting an idea into a functioning business. 
• Understanding what your consumers want and finding the best way to deliver it to them. 
• Creating, offering and exchanging products. 
• We can use the current market as inspiration, looking at similar businesses or service providers. 
• Identify customer needs and adopt the 'we have something you want/need' approach. 
• Market research helps to identify a target market. 
• Management is about monitoring and assessing. 
• Pricing strategy.
• Analysis. 
• Distribution networks - getting your business seen. 
• Profit and efficiency. 
• Value added benefits. 
• Anything can be marketed, marketing is a creative process. 

PRODUCT, PRICE, PLACE, PROMOTION
MARKETING MIX = TARGET MARKET

Benefits of Marketing

• Allows you to explain the product/service to potential customers. 
• Helps you to understand the needs your product meets and the problems it solves. 
• Looking to the future, thinking about where we would want to be a few years down the line. 
• Thinking about why people should come to us, and finding our unique selling point. 
• Hitting a range of audiences. 

Market Research 

Primary Research - anything involving engaging with an audience such as interviews, questionnaires and contacting people directly.

Secondary Research - anything found in books, magazines, on the internet, etc. Someone else has done the research and you have found it relevant to your own task. 

Quantitative data - publishes evidence. 

Qualitative data - opinions. 

A partnership of both of these makes a strong argument. 

My Individual SWOT Analysis
Strengths

• It gives up and coming creatives the chance to get their work seen. 
• People will feel like its a one off opportunity when the products become available for sale, they may be more inclined to make a purchase. 
• There are no costs to the entrants and if they win, the prints get made and shipped for them. 

Weaknesses

• Most of the reliance is on the selling of the products for us to make a profit. 
• We would need to figure out the pros and cons of various printing methods, printing to order will be expensive but printing more than we need may result in lost money and too many leftovers which we can't get rid of.

Opportunities

• There could be a calendar at the end of the year compiling selected entries from each month. 
• We could earn more money through advertising on the website. 

Threats

• People might want to directly sell something they have made through a site like Etsy because this would avoid the process of a competition and them not being sure if it will even be for sale. 
• Maybe not enough people will enter the competition and we won't be able to select twelve good pieces of work. 

The Combined SWOT Analysis

Simplifying it...
Since the session I have been thinking that this is a lot of points to have on one list. As we are going to include this in our final presentation I think it is important to make it more direct and to the point. This is my attempt at putting the group's work from this task into simplified bullet points. 

Strengths

• It has been shown through the success of similar websites that the art community is vast and projects like this will always gain interest. 
• The business supports up and coming creatives by giving them a fair percentage of the profits, helping them to get their work seen through the sale of prints and also the temporary promotion of their other work. 
• The selected winners don't have to do anything other than wait for a payment, all of the printing, packaging and postage is carried out by us. 
• The themes are always going to be refreshing and moving with the times, and the only constraints for the work is that it can be digitally printed at the three specified sizes. There is no house style and all work will be viewed with an open mind. 
• Being based online and having our printing being carried out by another party means that we wouldn't need a large base, maybe just a small office space with space for meetings. 

Weaknesses

• Our profit margins are going to be slim and a lot of the profit is reliant on the prints actually selling. 
• Shorts run printing and printing to order will be high cost, but we also don't want to overestimate numbers and lose money through having leftovers. 
• Only having a website and no physical location means it will take a lot of promotion to get noticed. 
• Upkeep of the website may be costly, paying for someone to design and code the website. 

Opportunity

• We could buy our own printers when we have enough profits to be stable, this would mean we would need a bigger space to work in. 
• Potentially starting forums, blogs, email newsletter and a strong social media presence. 
• We can start to build relationships with printers, creative retail chains and galleries to help promote the website in physical locations as well.
• There is the potential to bring back successful designs and put them on sale again, for example top selling designs from through the year or a calendar which is a compilation of the best from each month. 
• We could look to expand the product range if the business proves successful.

Threats

• There is the possibility that nothing will sell. 
• People might not want us to be the middle man and might find direct selling site more appropriate for selling their work. 
• Maybe not enough people will enter and we will struggle to select twelve designs we want to sell. 
• People might get bored of the same products being on sale for one month and maybe forget to check it again the following month. 

Name selection and Primary Research
We managed to narrow down our ever expanding list of name ideas and successfully whittled it down to eight potential names and to get some feedback from others, we posted it on Facebook with the hope of receiving some feedback. I can see the group is slightly torn between a name that describes the business and a snappy name that is technically irrelevant but memorable. We will have to see what feedback we receive before trying to make a final decision. Although the name is what the business is remembered by, I don't think a bad name will either make or break the business. Realistically, the structure and ethos and all the other details are more influential on the business as a whole.

Summary of session
I think this has been a productive session for our group. It was good that everyone was still on the same wavelength even though we haven't met up face to face as a group since before the christmas break. It really helped that everyone in the group turned up because it makes it so much easier to make decisions there and then. Although I have attempted to simplify the SWOT analysis, I think it could be cut down even more to make it less wordy. I think the next step for the group is evaluating any responses we get for our name and also going ahead and planning a presentation. I think it would be most effective to divide up the tasks and then have times where we meet up to make sure all the different parts work in sync.