Which class period are you in?
Draft a product. Get handed a customer and a constraint. Two weeks to make it real — and prove every decision with evidence.
Read this before you touch anything else.
You are the marketing department of a new venture. You have funding, a factory partner, and nothing else — no product, no customer, no plan.
The draft below hands you a target segment and a constraint you cannot design your way out of — plus three product categories to choose between. You keep one. The other two go to somebody else, and you will be asked why you let them go. Everything after that is yours to invent.
Your job is to take those three inputs and build a complete marketing mix — Product, Price, Place, Promotion — that a real investor would fund. The catch is the standard of proof. In this mission, an opinion is not an answer. Every one of the four P's must trace back to something you actually found out: a competitor's real shelf price, a number from your own survey, a market figure with a source, a margin you calculated.
That is why the investigation comes first and the decisions come second. Departments that skip ahead to the fun part — naming the product, designing the logo — consistently produce a mix that falls apart under the first hard question. Do the digging. The creative work is better when it is aimed at something.
Three cards, keep one. Every member enters their agent number first — 3 minimum, 5 maximum. Once you confirm, it is recorded: no re-rolls, and once a category is taken it is gone from the room.
Fixed. These two are not yours to choose.
Your hand. Pick one. The other two go back in the deck for another department — and on Day 8 you will be asked why you passed on them.
Everyone in the department types their agent number in, then one of you deals. You get three product categories and keep one. Write the code on your team sheet and in the header of every document you turn in.
Ten small things that made real money. None of them started with someone wanting to start a company.
Before you invent anything, look at what actually gets invented. Every product below began the same way: one person was annoyed by something specific, and paid attention to it instead of shrugging.
None of them are clever. A band of cardboard. A bend in a straw. Wheels turned ninety degrees. That is the point — you are not being asked to be brilliant. You are being asked to notice.
The rule worth stealing: find the workaround.
Cafés were double-cupping. Women were cutting the feet off their pantyhose. Somebody had already jammed a folding chair under two baskets. When people are already solving your problem badly, you have proof of demand before you build a single thing — and the shape of their workaround tells you what to build.
Notice also how few of these were fast. The bendy straw took ten years to find a buyer. Velcro took fifteen. Post-it failed on its first launch. Scrub Daddy sat in storage for three years after a major corporation looked at it and passed. Slow is normal; the ones you've heard of are the ones who kept going.
And notice where the win actually came from. Only three of these ten were won on the product itself. The rest were won on where it was sold or how it was introduced — which is the entire argument for the four P's, and the reason your product idea is the beginning of this mission rather than the end of it.
If you can't name the workaround, you haven't found the problem yet — go back to Dig 02 and ask people what they currently do instead.
Three questions your department answers before you design anything:
Four required digs. Nobody on your team writes a single word about the four P's until all four are done and in the Evidence Locker.
Your Evidence Locker is one shared document where every fact your department finds gets logged with a source and a date. Number each entry E1, E2, E3… Later, when you justify a pricing or channel decision, you will cite those numbers directly. If a claim in your final brief has no E-number behind it, it does not count.
Find three real products already competing for your segment's money. Not three brands — three specific products you can look up and price.
Deliverable: comparison table, 3 columns × 4 rows, plus a short “gap we found” paragraph.
Survey or interview at least 10 people in your target segment. Not classmates unless classmates are the segment. Ask these five, in this order:
Push on question 1 until you get the workaround — the annoying thing they already do instead. That answer is worth more than the other four combined; see the cases above.
Those last three questions are the whole ballgame. Plot the answers and you will see a real acceptable price range instead of a guess.
Deliverable: raw response sheet + a 5-bullet “what surprised us” summary.
The light one — give it half an hour, not an evening. You need just enough to prove the category is worth entering. Find and cite two things:
Acceptable sources: industry association reports, government data (Census, BLS), trade publications, public company annual reports. A random blog with no source is not evidence. Cite the source and the year for both.
Deliverable: 2 cited facts + one sentence on why this market is worth entering anyway. Bonus: growth rate, and whether it is speeding up or slowing.
Estimate what one unit costs you to make and deliver. Break it into materials, manufacturing, packaging, and shipping. Look up real prices for the materials — sourcing sites and bulk suppliers publish them.
Then set your floor. Below this number you lose money on every sale:
Deliverable: cost breakdown table, unit cost, and your price floor at a 40% target margin.
Work them in this order. Each one feeds the next, and each one has a gate you must pass before moving on.
You invent this — the thing, and the brand around it
Part one — the thing
Part two — the brand
A product is what you make. A brand is what a customer believes about it before they ever touch it. Two identical water bottles at different prices sell at different rates because of this part, and nothing else. Build it here, because Price, Place and Promotion all have to serve it.
GATE: every feature must trace to an E-number — a feature nobody asked for is a feature you cut. Then hand your promise and your three trait pairs to someone outside your department. If they cannot describe your customer back to you, the brand is not built yet.
Three numbers before one decision
GATE: if your price sits outside the floor–ceiling window, you do not have a price. You have a problem to solve — cut cost, or add value the survey says people will pay for.
Follow the customer, then check the math
GATE: if the margin stack breaks your price, go back to Price and fix it now. Do not present a mix that loses money.
One message, three channels, real numbers
GATE: show a stranger your headline and nothing else. If they can't tell you what it does and who it's for, no budget will fix that. Rewrite the line, not the plan.
At the end of Day 5, something happens to your product that you did not choose. Every department gets one. No two departments get the same one.
Up to this point you have been building on a still surface. Real markets do not hold still, and a plan that only works when nothing changes is not a plan — it is a wish.
So you get a card. A competitor cuts price. A material cost jumps. Your channel drops you. Somebody with four hundred thousand followers posts your product and you have no inventory.
This is where the digging pays off, and where guessing shows. A department that knows its unit cost, its floor, its ceiling and its break-even can answer in four minutes. A department that wrote numbers down once and never looked at them again cannot answer at all — and everyone in the room will be able to tell which is which.
Opens at the end of Day 5. Enter your department name to pull it.
What you turn in: one page. What changed, which of your numbers moved and to what, what you decided, and the recomputed math that supports it. If your event touched Price, your break-even is recalculated. If it touched Place, your margin stack is redone. Cite the E-numbers you are revising.
“It doesn't really affect us.” Every event on the deck moves at least one number in your brief. Find it.
The four P's are one system. This is where teams find out theirs isn't.
A premium price sold at a discount chain is not a strategy — it is a contradiction, and a customer feels it instantly. Your brand is the thing all four P's have to agree with. Before you present, your department answers all six of these in writing.
Then send an auditor. Each department sends one member to another department for ten minutes. You go alone, you take their brief, and you find the single weakest link in their mix — naming it specifically and citing which of their own numbers exposes it. Vague feedback earns no credit, for them or for you.
Defending a number to someone who did not help you pick it is most of the job. Ten minutes of that is worth more than an hour of your own team agreeing with itself.
Outside judges, a real prototype, and every student in the room holding capital they have to spend on somebody.
Day 8 is not a presentation to your teacher. There are outside judges in the room, and every student in the class is holding three investment tokens they must spend on departments other than their own. You cannot invest in yourself, and you cannot abstain.
That means every pitch matters to everyone. It also means the winner is decided by the room, not by a rubric line.
Two pages maximum. Mission code in the header. The problem, the product, the brand platform, the four P's with the numbers behind each, your market-event response, and your Evidence Locker attached.
Cardboard, tape, foam, a 3D print, a dressed-up existing object — whatever gets the idea into someone's hands. It does not have to work. It has to be held. A drawing is not a prototype.
Filmed on a phone. Your headline, your brand voice, your segment. Sixty seconds is a hard cap — going over is a fail, because the discipline is the lesson.
Roughly: 1 min problem, 1.5 min product, 1 min brand, 1.5 min price, 1 min place, 1 min promotion, 1 min market event. Show the prototype. Play the ad. Every member presents a section.
Then four minutes of questions, and the judges do not go easy. Expect:
A department that did the investigation answers these cold. A department that guessed cannot — and the room is holding the money.
Eight class days. Work between sessions is expected.
| Day | In class | Due at the start of next class |
|---|---|---|
| Day 1 | Form departments, assign roles, pull your mission code, read the brief | Evidence Locker started; Dig 01 competitor list chosen |
| Day 2 | Competitor teardown workshop; write your survey questions | Dig 01 complete; survey live and circulating |
| Day 3 | Market data lab (short) and cost & margin workshop — both in one period | Digs 03 and 04 complete |
| Day 4 | Survey results land; brand workshop — name, promise, trait pairs, voice | Dig 02 complete — Evidence Locker closed; brand platform drafted |
| Day 5 | Build Product (thing + brand) and Price; start the prototype. Market event pulled at the end of class. | Product spec, brand platform, price with all three numbers |
| Day 6 | Respond to your market event, then build Place and Promotion | Event response page; channel plan with margin stack; launch calendar |
| Day 7 | Coherence audit + auditor swap; film the 60-second ad; finish the prototype | Brief, prototype, ad and pitch all ready |
| Day 8 | Investor Day — pitches, outside judges, capital | — |
Note where the weight sits. The creative work matters, but the evidence behind it matters more.
| Criterion | What earns full credit | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Evidence quality | All four digs complete, sources cited and credible, survey has 10+ real responses | 20% |
| Justified decisions | Every P traces to an E-number; price defended with floor, ceiling, and benchmark; the two passed-over categories defended | 20% |
| Brand platform | Promise, three real trait pairs, positioning, and a look and voice that fit this segment — specific, not generic | 10% |
| Market response | Your event actually moved a number, you recomputed it, and the decision follows from the new math | 10% |
| Coherence | The four P's reinforce each other and sound like the brand; margin math survives the channel cut | 10% |
| Constraint handling | Your Dial C constraint is genuinely designed around, not ignored or hand-waved | 10% |
| Prototype, ad & pitch | A prototype you can hand someone, an ad under 60 seconds, a pitch on time with every member speaking and questions answered with numbers | 15% |
| Department contribution | Peer evaluation and your logged role in the Evidence Locker | 5% |
| Total | 100% | |
You choose your category from three. You do not choose your customer or your constraint — and a constraint you didn't want is the most useful thing on this page.
Your department decides who owns what — but every member owns at least one P and one dig, and it is logged.
An estimate is fine if you show how you got it. A number with no source and no method is treated as blank.
Survey responses come from actual humans in your segment. Ten real answers beat fifty imagined ones.
Use it to find sources, structure a survey, or check your math — then verify. Your decisions and your writing are yours.
On Day 5 something changes that you did not pick. Every department gets one. It will move at least one number in your brief.
Log the source the moment you find the fact. Reconstructing citations the night before is how departments lose 30% of their grade.