The Apprentice: Neil Clough’s take on the latest task

ANOTHER  interesting task for the teams, combining creativity and sales to come up with a innovative board game. And once again, both teams went about it in completely different ways (with varying levels of success!).
 
Summit, led by James, immediately selected the family market, while Pamela’s Tenacity team went for a far more risky (and risqué) board game for adults.

From my perspective, while it’s good to try and stand out and create a unique product in the marketplace, it can all too often come back and bite you, and that’s exactly what happened. Markets exist for a reason, and sometimes it’s best to take the safer option and let your sales technique do the talking.
 
Pamela would have realised this error had she listened to her audience. Lord Sugar puts on market research for a reason – so that the teams understand what the market wants. Having been involved in a number of these sessions, I understand the time pressure that is placed upon these tasks, but if you’re getting unanimous disapproval, it doesn’t take a genius to realise you’ve got to go back to the drawing board!
 
I’m not going to take credit for this, but after slating him for being a clown for the last couple of weeks, it was good to see James take my advice and get serious this week!

However, he continues to focus on volume of sales over value. Where his team were selling at £17 a unit, he looked happy to be getting £10 for them. Having got serious, he now needs to see that huge orders are great, but if you’re selling your product for nothing, you’ll end up with no profit and back in the boardroom and in the firing line.
 
It was also interesting to see some tactics come into the process this week, with both Lauren, and more obviously, Mark, seemingly playing a game. Mark pushing Pamela into the project manager role showed me that he’s still hiding a little bit. Though I think he performed well in the task – anyone who can sell that game deserves credit – the approach he’s taking isn’t going to wash with Lord Sugar for too long.
 
Ultimately, Pamela had to go. She backed the wrong idea, against the advice of the target market. As a so-called marketing expert, surely she should have see that there was no market for this game?

That’s not to say that there weren’t a couple of others lucky to escape the boot this week. Daniel again showed he has more lives than a cat, fighting his way out of what looked a difficult situation in the boardroom. I found it laughable how he looked to cover his backside at every turn, complaining behind the PM’s back about the concept.
 
However, the real ‘one that got away’ for me this week is Bianca. I know she was on the winning team, but some mistakes deserve an instant dismissal, regardless of victory.

I can’t imagine that Lord Sugar would want a business partner handing exclusivity of his product to the whole of Westminster for SIX sales! As with Daniel, she found herself arguing far too much with the PM, and disrupting the task, and I think it’s only a matter of time before she’s gone.
 
At the other end of the spectrum, Roisin had a good week. She almost single-handedly came up with the concept and design of GeoKnow, which in the end won the task. Though I felt her efforts were not fully appreciated by the rest of her team in the boardroom, I’m sure this success will have been noted by Lord Sugar.
 
My moment of the episode? You can tell your product’s not going to be successful when a member of the public tells you ‘if someone got this out at a party, I think I’d probably leave!’