The firing of James, Lorraine, and Debra in The Apprentice UK Series 5 Episode 11 brought us down to the final two: Kate Walsh and Yasmina Siadatan. Kate’s the clear frontrunner here. Yasmina, however, has performed well, despite the fact that I expected her to struggle when she acknowledged she was bitchy and difficult to work for. The other three certainly deserved to be fired, with James seemingly skating by for a while, Lorraine clearly floundering, and Debra just being mean to co-workers because she thinks that’s how the world works.
Returning for the task are some familiar faces. Yasmina wins the coin toss.
Yasmina’s team: Howard, Lorraine, James, Philip
Kate’s team: Ben, Debra, Kim, Rocky (the guy from week two?)
Their task is to create and launch a box of chocolates with an eye catching marketing campaign. The chocolate industry is worth over £3.5 billion.
James suggests aiming their product at males, since there’s less competition. Philip just wants to do something quirky. Yasmina likes the idea, so they aim their chocolates at men.
Ben would like to do a romantic campaign aimed at couples. Ben suggests a his and hers box. Kate likes that idea since it’s unique. However, there is no way in the world Kate will agree to a box with a 69 on it.
Yasmina’s team meets with a focus group. They don’t like the concept. Phil wants to run with it. Like with Pantsman. People will get it eventually. Yeah, he’s still waiting for that to happen. They’ve decided on the name Cocoa Electric. If they say so. Having met with men, they will now meet with women to discuss the concept. The women aren’t impressed either. They’ve abandoned the male focus to one with shocking flavors instead.
Kate’s team has a good idea. They have met with the box designers and are going for a box with three drawers, one for him, one for her, and one to share. Now they just need to come up with a name.
While they’re brainstorming for a name, Debra and Rocky are designing recipes. The ingredients they are looking at will be more expensive than Kate had originally wanted. She wanted £8-9. They want her to go up to £13-16. She is willing to go up to £13 at most, and Debra says that it will be a commercially viable product at that rate.
Yasmina’s team is aiming for a lower price, perhaps around £5 per box.
Kate’s brand name is Intimate. Nick is confused. He thinks it sounds like something about feminine freshness. Debra thinks it looks like a box of Tampax. Okay, perhaps time to change that. They have decided on Choc D’Amour.
When the boxes arrive the next morning, it’s time to shoot their TV ads.
While half of Yasmina’s team tries to figure out how to get people to believe their flavors are worth eating, the other half of her team is auditioning dancers for the next morning. Philip is having quite a bit of fun.
The Choc D’Amour ad is about a romantic night in, while Cocoa Electric is about people looking shocked. Their actors hate the taste, so that should help make them look shocked.
Kate considers Kim’s direction to be a bit cliche, and a bit 1980s. She wants to spice things up. Maybe if they smear chocolate all over the girl’s face and tie the guy up.
Yasmina is editing her commercial, while the rest of the team designs a poster. The poster team has put the logo and the name on a black background and called it a day.
The project managers will be doing their own pitches. Kate seems pretty comfortable. Yasmina is dreading it because she realizes her presentation style is, well, bad.
First up is Kate with Choc D’Amour, branded as a luxury chocolate. With the current economic climate, staying in is the new going out. There are 6 different flavors, and they’ve all been given a romantic name. Sir Alan thinks their price is a lot. Their ad campaign is playful and mischievious. The question she gets from the audience: what was behind the very ambitious pricing?
Next door, I hope somebody likes purple. Cocoa Electric is flavored to shock. Their price is not, though, at £6, putting it at the lower end of the market and less than half that of Choc D’Amour. The question they get: do you think the flavors work? Yasmina insists that everybody has been complimentary (even the actor who wanted to spit it out). As for the pricing, it costs about 7 pence to produce each chocolate, so it should be very commercially viable.
Kate gave a good presentation as expected, and despite being worried how she would do, Yasmina did well, too.
Now it’s time for Sir Alan to get industry feedback. Choc D’Amour is a great new product, but the pricing is the key question mark. As for Cocoa Electric, the brand is good, the pricing is good, but would anyone buy it again after tasting it the first time?
Although there were chocolates in the supermarket for £16, they were from established brands. For a new brand, it’s going to be a tough sell to push a high price. This product would need to establish itself before it would be up with them.
On the other end of the rainbow is Cocoa Electric, which has a cheap price, but it’s also made of the cheapest possible ingredients.
Nick sat next to the marketing director of the biggest chocolate company in Europe, and he said their people would have taken months to get where these girls got in a couple days, so he’d hire both of them.
Kate is looking to develop her 10 year career plan with a company to be a director with a large team. Is she just going to be a presenter who’s good at sales? I’m not sure I get that logic, as Kate’s proved to be more than that.
As for Yasmina, we’re going back to whether she should be giving up her day job as part owner of a restaurant.
The Apprentice UK Series 5 winner is Yasmina. I don’t get hiring someone who has indicated she wants to work for Sir Alan for a few years then go off on her own like she is already, but there you have it.
The Apprentice UK is currently casting for series 6. The series will air in 2010, without Margaret. In addition, a Junior Apprentice for people aged 16-17 is currently casting. Nobody will be hired, but the winner will receive a prize of up to £25,000.