Business competition - marketing/sales ideas

daz · 28 Feb 2006 at 13:04

Hi guys, I'm taking part in a business competition this week for KCL. Today we have been challenged with the task of selling a particular product, and it has found out to be an incredibly difficult one to shift.

It is "Hands2Go" and is a hand sanitiser, but is non-alcohol based unlike the competition, so it's much kinder and moisturising to your hands using natural extracts of aloe vera and blah blah blah.

We've got to sell these bottles of the sanitiser above our cost price, which is £3.10 per unit - anyone got any ideas? We've tried selling to independent sandwich shops and restaurants, but it's really proving difficult. We have to make as much profit before 15.30 as possible, if anyone has any genius ideas, the pint will be in the post.

daz · 28 Feb 2006 at 13:10

Borris said:
You're trying to either enter a mature market, or enter a non-market.

Either way, you will probably have to give the stuff away for free.

£3.10 unit cost? You're being taken for a ride.

That's becoming more and more apparent to us as the day goes on. Oh well, I hope the other teams do rubbish too.

daz · 28 Feb 2006 at 13:11

Problem is the sanitiser doesn't even come in those packs that fit into dispensers, it's like a hand spray thing. ( :rolleyes:

at product, not anyone in the thread!)

daz · 28 Feb 2006 at 18:23

Well we didn't manage to sell too many, only 16 in the end but we got something like £80 for our trouble. We had a good margin on our products, I think some people sold more than us, but only made 50p per item.

Thanks for your help... we were so dejected after phoning around dozens of places up to lunch time, in the end we just went to Oxford Street etc and sold them on the street.

Tomorrow our challenge involves running a section of the LSE bar: we have to bid for the various drinks of the bar stock (i.e. Grolsch, Coke, Vodka) in the afternoon and then sell them on during the evening 7pm-11pm. E.g. we could decided to buy up all the coke and monopolise, or we could go for drinks that might not cost us so much in the auction, and probably won't sell very many but that we could make a good margin on. Or we could just go middle-of-the-road and spread the risk.