I can't believe this is the last blog!

As a general rule, I’m not a huge fan of group projects. You never know what kind of group you’re going to get assigned into, and it’s always so hard to coordinate everyone’s schedules. This project, however, was a lot of fun to work on, my group was great and the time commitment was very reasonable – not to mention I learned a lot as well.

One thing I learned was how to segment a market. As a Marketing major, this is probably a fairly important skill to have. We learned a little about market segmentation in my introductory marketing course, but we didn’t learn how to actually do it. This was one of the first things we did in our group project, and it was unexpectedly more detailed of a process than I thought it would be. Once we broadly segmented our group began adding more and more specifics to it, especially the girls. We discovered how much stereotyping could help us, which also surprised me a lot, but it also led to us questioning whether or not we were getting too restricted in defining our segment. After we decided on newlyweds, we narrowed it down to a certain age range. We were talking about how so many of our friends are already getting engaged and married at such a young age, and it kind of led to us deciding that our newlyweds were going to be young, just graduating college or grad school. The age was also more relatable to us so it made it a little more interesting. Also, as business school students, it was hard for us to picture our newlyweds as penny pinchers, so we gave them a good amount of disposable income to spend and without any kids to worry about. After this stage, our group, especially the girls, got really caught up in what exactly this couple was like. We talked about their daily activities, what they ate, what their hobbies might be, whether or not they would have pets, how their home would be decorated, things like that. It was really fun pretending to be these people and trying to figure out what their lives would be like, especially in the beginning of the project when we didn’t have many restraints yet. Eventually we learned to let go of our ideal newlywed couple and alter our segment to a slightly more realistic, broader one.

The second thing I learned during the project was how to take the information from the interviews and try to find the insights hidden in them. Not all the interviews we conducted had similar answers, so it was interesting to go back a second time and ask more specific questions especially since we had a better idea of what we wanted to find out. Once we did that, the similarities came out and it was really cool to see what these couples had in common. It also was fun because once we got some insights, we also started coming up with ideas for a product/service. Before we had that information, we were brainstorming a lot of products we could do, but the problem with having the kitchen as our room is that almost every product imaginable for the kitchen is already out in the market. After conducting the second round of interviews though, and talking to Forrest a bit, we came up with a few ideas for services. I was surprised at how much easier it was to come up with services after we did the second round of interviews and asked more detailed questions, especially since we branched out and asked what the couples used their kitchens for that aren’t necessarily activities that traditionally take place there. It was surprising, especially after how into the segmenting we got, how many things we learned about our segment’s habits, behaviors and attitudes.

As for my group, I loved working on this project with them. It was a really interesting, fun and less stressful project to work on, and my group was great. We were joking today about it being the last class day, and Amanda said she felt like she was graduating high school because we had become really good friends and we didn’t really know when we’d see each other next. Our group worked really well together and we were very productive whenever we met. If we ever got off track or diverged for a little bit, someone would get us back to work. Working with my group definitely contributed to my enjoyment of this project. It’s a great group project because we were able to brainstorm together and bounce ideas off of each other, not to mention someone would say something or have an idea that I know I’d never be able to come up with myself. Having the mini presentations throughout the semester really helped us manage our time and progress with the project, and the instructor input during the presentations was always funny and informative. I loved how relaxed the presentations were, and it took some pressure off of the project. Overall, I think this class is great, the project was fun and it was overall a great experience. I didn’t think I’d learn so much from a class that didn’t have any tests, but the discussions, articles and videos were much better than learning from a book. So basically, great project, great class!