The Apprentice Advertising Challenge

This weeks task on the Apprentice was to advertise a shampoo by creating the packaging of the product, a digital billboard advertisement and a short TV advertisement. The teams also had to pitch their products to giants in the advertising industry such as JCDecaux. The shampoo itself was the same for each team; with the unique selling point of cactus oil used in the product.

Both teams took vastly different approaches when marketing the product. The all-male team decided to target a young male audience whereas the all-female team chose to target the 'grey pound' (an older audience).

The all- male team were the victors in this task, their strong point being the packaging, creating an incredibly sleek bottle for the product, with the clever use of a cactus as the letter 'T' in the product name 'western'.

The all-female teams packaging was their downfall however, choosing to include a cactus flower on their bottle as opposed to a cactus. This did not communicate strongly enough the unique selling point of the product, the cactus oil.

The task manager of the all-female team was eliminated from the process as it was her executive decision to not include the cactus.

This just demonstrates the importance in advertising to communicate the unique selling point of your product or service; after all this is what a company hopes will set them apart from other similar companies and make them stand out on a shelf for example.