Apprentice - scent packing

[zico]

Last week Pamela was told she needs to emerge from the shadows and has to be PM this week, which is a spot of luck for her as this week’s task is to market and create a new perfume, which is Pamela’s actual business. On the downside, the Lord moves Dean onto her team so together with Lewis, that’s the 3 weakest candidates all together in Team Empower. Pamela tells us this is an ideal task for her and that’s she definitely not going to lose this week.

Over on Team Unison team we have the weekly tradition of Lottie pitching for the PM role and being rejected, this time in favour of Carina who gives us a convincing reason why she wanted to be PM saying “I just didn’t want Lottie as PM, that’s it really”. Fair enough. We then follow up with the equally traditional part where Lottie comes up with ideas which are then rejected by the rest of the team, probably wisely this week, because Lottie wants to target the androgynous market, though the others reject it on account of not knowing what androgynous means (and it’s not clear from Lottie’s explanation that she knows either) . They decide to focus on the unisex market, on the practical grounds that at least they know what unisex means, and also it’s easier to spell.

Pamela is finally in charge, so asks Dean and Lewis what they think, then delay and dithers before making a decision, but nobody is quite sure what the decision is. Eventually it transpires her decision is to focus on womens’ perfume. She initially thinks it’s a good idea to send Dean off on his own to make a new perfume, but is persuaded by Lewis’s raised eyebrows that Dean doing anything on his own is a truly terrible idea, so accompanies Dean, leaving marketing person Lewis to do the branding, giving him a brief of a modern woman breaking the mould.

An expert tells both teams how to make perfume, emphasising they shouldn’t use too many different scents, so Lottie and Carina limit themselves to a mere 14 different scents. Karen says they’ve thrown everything but the kitchen sink in and it smells like a kitchen sink. On the other team, Pamela creates a scent without too much fuss while Dean follows her around saying “yeah”.

Scarlett is designing and branding on her own, and creates an orange and black box with a quirky bottle, calling it “Captivation” which is a decent enough effort. Scarlett is quietly competent, as usual. Lottie sees this and criticises the entire sub-team (a.k.a. Scarlett) calling it “appalling” but Carina say it’s not appalling. Speaking of appalling, Lottie has designed a poster straight out of the 80’s with a high-heeled secretary on the phone with a boss looming over her as they both reach for the unisex perfume bottle. They are supposed to be equals, but it sure doesn’t look like it from their poster.

Pride goes before a fall as Lewis tells us how easy he’s finding it to work on his own, then promptly gets some kind of creative block and can’t think of any ideas, only just meeting the deadline, while Claude looks on frustrated and aghast at Lewis’s incompetence. Lewis corrects the graphic designer’s spelling of “Parfum” to “Parfam” and also has his very own ideas on how to spell “independent”. For their label, he picks a photo of a woman with very short shorts going trekking and calls their scent “Determination”. It’s a really bad effort, even for an Apprentice candidate. Meanwhile, Dean and Pamela are shooting a poster of a model who looks the complete opposite to the picture on the bottle, a moody-looking model who wouldn’t be seen dead up a mountain.

When Pamela sees what Lewis has done, she is amazed (and not in a good way), saying it looks like a roll-on deodorant for hikers – which it does. I quite like Lewis’s tagline “Push Boundaries, Move Mountains” but Pamela doesn’t. In retaliation, Lewis decides he doesn’t like anything that Pamela and Dean have done, though it’s a tad unfair to blame Dean because, as usual, he hasn’t done anything. Lewis says Dean has been “as useful as a wet fart”, which is harsh but fair, though I’m not sure Lewis the person to be doing any finger-pointing here.

They have 2 major retailers to pitch to. The first retailer doesn’t like Lottie’s 80’s stereotype poster, so Carina decides to ditch the poster for the 2nd presentation, only to find the retailer is unhappy they don’t have a poster. Well, can’t win ‘em all. Actually, they couldn’t win any of them.

Pamela has wisely restricted Dean to just handing out scent samples, and hopefully saying something helpful about their product. Dean demonstrates his pitching skills by dropping the scent samples on the floor, then saying virtually nothing. After saying how much they hate the bottle and packaging, the retailers also helpfully point out some extra spelling mistakes on the packing. In other words, they didn’t like anything that Lewis did.

I’m half expecting the result to be a nil-nil draw as it’s hard to see either retailer making any orders. Back in the boardroom and it turns out that one retailer gave 8,000 pretend orders for Pamela’s perfume, while the other retailer gave 9,000 pretend orders for Carina’s perfume. Pamela gets criticised for being useless at leadership and also for putting marketing expert Lewis in charge of marketing, which seems a bit of an odd criticism, especially as the alternative would have been to hope Dean could do something on his own. Lewis gets criticised for being useless at his specialist day job, while Dean gets criticised for being useless at everything, all the time.

It would be a travesty if anyone but Dean were to be sacked, and he’s duly scent packing, with the Lord saying he’s done absolutely nothing in all his time on the Apprentice and is completely and utterly useless, but softens the blow by surprisingly asking him to keep in touch. If he’s serious, that’s one big mentoring task for Lord Sugar to get Dean up to scratch.

So, the last of the tasks and somehow Pamela has survived, despite being virtually invisible throughout, mainly through pure luck of being on the winning team most of the time, and having someone even worse than her on the occasions she’s lost.

Next week it’s my favourite episode, where apprentices’ business plans get taken apart by a variety of tough interviewers. So far, Scarlett and Carina are looking the best of the bunch, but Lord Sugar usually starts getting a bit random at this stage about who he prefers.

[Clitheroekid]

Just to say - again - how much I enjoy these excellent summaries. They actually make me laugh out loud, which is a rarity when I'm simply reading something

It's worth gritting my teeth to watch The Apprentice just for the pleasure in reading them, and my main regret when it finishes won't be the loss of a dubious Wednesday evening delight but the fact that I won't have these to look forward to any more.

[zico]

Many thanks CK - I really appreciate the kind words, and glad some of it even makes you laugh out loud.

I too rarely laugh out loud at what I read, but Clive James's early books have quite a few bits which really made me laugh, which may also appeal to you.
His first autobiographical book "Unreliable Memoirs" (his childhood in Australia) is good, and also "Visions Before Midnight" and "Crystal Bucket" - the latter two are collections of his TV reviews in the 1970's anbd 80's. Some of the reviews are really laugh-out-loud funny, and it's also a nice bit of nostalgia.