Marketing and Design Challenges

After class today we met and talked about who we should be our target market segments for this product. The research shows that most wine drinkers (about 80%) have at least some level of college education. This became a big topic of conversation and point of emphasis on our Segmentation Tree that we must have complete for Wednesday.

Other issues that could arise in the coming months as we do more research into the materials needed for this project include the following:
-Making tradeoff decisions that may force us to decide between lower cost and higher quality
-Creating a product that is customer friendly and easy to use despite the multiple functions we hope our product will have.
-Creating a rod that is an effective cooling device but is small enough to fit into to the top of the wine bottle and also does not displace wine from the bottle.

Our teams product is called the Cooling Cork and our company is named UnCOREkd. Our product is designed to act as a wine cooling device that can bring white wine and other beverages to optimal temperatures for drinking. The main element of the design is a cooling rod that is inserted into the top of a bottle of wine. This rod piece attached to a plastic hollow cork by plastic tongs that allow the wine to be poured while the cooling device is inserted. This plastic cork also attaches to the lid of the wine cooling device that can be opened and closed for storage purposes.

Below you will see a rough prototype for the Cooling Cork:

Today our team had the OM Product Design Workshop. This was a good opportunity for us to further explain our idea to the rest of the class and Professor Dwyer. We seemed to have a good overall response but many of the challenges we face in our design could be very complicated.

My name is Emily Pallotta and I'm a junior in Boston University's School of Management concentrating in Law and either Marketing or Finance. I'm also a part of the SMG honors program and will be minoring in history. I also play for the Boston University Women's soccer team as a starting midfielder. Our team has been to the NCAA tournament all three seasons and won the America East Championship in the past 2 out of 3 years since I joined the team. I also enjoy hanging out at the beach, listening to music, watching movies, hiking, and swimming. I enjoy traveling and I've been to Greece, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Czech Republic, and Italy. I hope to travel Eastern Europe and some other places around Europe when I graduate in May 2010.