Tuesday 18th November to Wednesday 19th November

T A S K  B R I E F

Day 1 and Day 2

Your first task will be spread over two days which will culminate in a 12 minute presentation in front of leading toy designers and retail marketers.

You will have to design a new and innovative toy and devise a marketing campaign to be launched this Christmas. The demographic that your product should appeal to are 9-12yr old boys. The design will have to be purely conceptual with any visual aids such as flipcharts and concept sketches advised. We understand that toy design is highly specialist and so the judges are not expecting completed technical designs. The toy will be judged on its creativity, use and how cost effective it is. We would like the teams to research into approximate production costs for their toy and how much they intend to sell it for. Issues such as warehousing/transport/office space/staff are not needed to be addressed, unless the design of the toy is going to have a huge impact on one of these areas.

The concept is only a small part of the challenge, the second being how you plan to take this toy to market. We are looking for a unique marketing campaign that will explain how this toy will succeed and which areas of the market it will conquer. We understand costing is a debatable issue when it comes to marketing, so we are imposing a marketing budget of £25,000. We are not expecting to see financial statements, but any marketing ploys which you are planning on using should be costed with the research shown/explained.

To aid you in this endeavour you will meet with leading consultants on day 1 of this task to discuss and advise you on your early ideas. The three consultants specialise in the areas of branding, marketing and innovation, you will find when reading there profiles that they have had a number of diverse projects and it is up to you to try and bring their expertise to help with this specific challenge. It could very well be that they have no idea about the toy industry, however they have been briefed on the challenge and have very fine tuned skills on how to market, brand and develop a product.

On the second day of this task you will refine your design and marketing strategy and further your presentation which you will present to a panel of expert judges in the afternoon. The judges will then have 3/4 minutes to ask questions and clear up any issues raised by your presentations. The presentations will be best shown using PowerPoint and we will provide these facilities. We have provided you with some A3 paper to start jotting down some potential ideas. Any visual aids outside of this will have to be provided by yourselves; however we will have a flipchart in the room for you to attach any sketches etc.