The evaluation phase has been my favorite phase by far. My team received great insight from our classmates, other students and executive partners that we will implement into our final presentation. Our initial in-class pitch session was instrumental in helping our team get on a more focused and cohesive path. We were able to integrate our three broad concepts (which was shown through our website prototype) based off our classmates insight. Our classmates unanimously prefered our idea of the Green point system and suggested that we implement some small sustainable changes we had listed into every hotel room. We received mixed feedback from them about our “Elite sustainable rooms”. Our initial name, “Marriott Eco-Community”, threw some people off because they did not see the sense of community through our ideas. We talked about this and agreed to change our name to Marriott Green Points before the final pitch day to give a clearer path for our viewers. We decided to keep our pitch board pretty much the same to get more insight about these three concepts before making a decision.
On pitch day, we received more of the same insight which has persuaded us to drop the elite hotel rooms from our project and focus on our point system and implementation of unique features into every Marriott Hotel. This would allow Marriott to become a leader in the industry and provide great PR and marketing material. The sustainable room option would be something Marriott could implement in the future, but based off the feedback we received, we had too many different ideas being implemented at once which overwhelmed the viewer.
Here are three main takeaways from this phase in the project:
- Difficulty in presenting our persona, Business Bill
- We were repeatedly asked why we chose Business Bill. Our team took a purposeful risk in marketing to Business Bill. We know that millennials are more environmentally conscious and would have been an easier market to focus on, but Business Bill travels and uses Marriott frequently. I feel we were able to market to this persona well through our unique rewards program. Erin created a unique comic that allowed the viewer to see a potential reaction of our persona to the Green Points concept. Reading and seeing the images allowed people to understand how our persona might react. It was difficult because very few of the people we got feedback from were our persona, Business Bill. The few executive partners that fit our persona description really liked our idea! Based off of feedback from our millennial friends, I also believe that different persons will accept and take part in our concept.
- Repetition, repetition, repetition
- I think I repeated my elevator speech 10 times on Friday. This was a good experience though because I was able to perfect my speech each time I spoke it. After the first pitch, I included some secondary background research in order to provide company history and address WHY we choose our path. The hard part now is breaking up the speech for our presentation because I feel I could present it myself after having to “present” it so many times on Friday haha!
- Listen and ask Questions
- The biggest takeaway was the insight received when you put on your listening cap and actively listen. Getting feedback and being critiqued is not always easy to take, but we got some really good feedback by truly listening. If we had not actively listened, then we would have missed insight people said. People did not write all their thoughts down. I suggest changing the name of this activity to something other than “Pitch Day.” Yes, we were pitching our idea, but when I think of pitching I think of something I am trying to sell. We wanted feedback. So we wanted to tell them our idea, but encourage questions and thoughts.