Non-alcoholic drink

Lessons from BBC TV’s “The Apprentice” – Series 16. 3. Non-alcoholic drink

It’s Episode Three in series 16 of BBC TV’s The Apprentice and this week’s task for Les Miserables is to develop a new non-alcoholic drink product. Dry January, anyone? Wet January, anyone? Viewers may need a good measure of the strong stuff to stomach this.

Once again the way you win this task is to secure more ‘hypothetical’ orders from the buyers than your opponents. So it helps to focus on that, knowing that they’re probably going to want to taste it themselves, and check out the branding. You ought to be focused on making something they will buy. And they will buy it if they believe they can sell it. This is what the task is all about. It’s not really about the product or the brand or the pitch, except so far as they lead the buyers to think there’s a sale in it for them. It’s really a waste of time arguing over the product name or what sort of product you ought to make unless it serves that outcome.

Neither team manages to create a decent tipple, so it’s more than a bit of a surprise that either gets any orders and that the winners secure such a big win: over 10,000 cases. As we all know, some products that are really on sale in shops are rubbish – and here we saw that happen. The difference? The brand. At least the vodka-not-alike had a decent, modern look and a credible name, ‘Vodify’. The beer-not-alike, on the other hand, disgusting as it apparently was, was not saved by a quaint and rather strange presentation reminiscent of something home-brewed, or knitted by one’s granny. You do wonder if any of these people have been to the shops and seen what real products actually look like.

So, once again, that sad lesson is that sometimes you win by being the less bad one.

As for sales, we were treated to the spectacle of one team pushing the premium price and exclusivity of their product to… no, not Fortnum and Mason, but Asda. No, they really haven’t been to the shops, have they? The smart move might have been to pivot quickly to get a big order for the price-conscious, mass market.

Something rather odd, and possibly unique in The Apprentice, happened in this episode. We saw a very autocratic leadership style (that’s not the unusual bit), but we also saw acquiescence to it on the part of other team members, not the usual bickering and grumbling (well, at least not anywhere near the usual scale that we see). I don’t know what it is that allows someone to take charge like that, failing to listen to, involve or engage others, and seem to be able to just do that. This feels like an unresolved lesson. Let’s see how he fares in future tasks.

One feature we haven’t seen yet in these first three episodes is the forensic unpicking of what was the reason for the failure of the losing team, and who the main culprit of that failure. That’s a shame, because it has been one aspect saving it from total ‘reality’ TV mode and bringing in a bit of objectivity. Instead, so far, it’s been all about personalities and whom His Lordship doesn’t really like the smell of.

So, where does the failure of the ‘beer’ lie? More in the branding, more in the selling or more in the stuff itself? Manifestly, from the outcome for the ‘vodka’, we saw that you can secure orders with bad stuff, despite poor sales, provided your brand does enough of the selling for you. But your best bet of the three, if you want to improve your chances, has to be in getting the stuff itself right, and the rest at least good enough.

And yet it’s those who claim to have ‘contributed’ most to the losing recipe who vaunt that in their defence, ganging up on the poor unfortunate, who, by their own argument, was not responsible for the wicked stuff since he didn’t ‘contribute’.

It’s not logical and it’s not fair and sometimes that’s how it is.