Term One - Which product to choose?

During Term One we have been extremely busy! Below is the process we went through to come to our final decision to 'produce a DVD which will demystify and simplify Maori culture and Marae protocol for people who have little or no knowledge of things Maori'.

Our first task was to find a product which we could all be proud of and we investigated many and varied ideas. after brainstorming. Then extensive investigation managed to reduce these products to about six and we finally reduced these to three which were then really thoroughly investigated. The whole team would have been happy to do any one of the final three products which were a DVD travel guide of the Eastern Bay of Plenty with emphasis on, although not exclusively, places, events and experiences of Maori interest, gift baskets of soap etc hand made and including essence of kawakawa leaves, a Maori medicinal remedy and a DVD which will demystify and simplify Marae protocol and Maori culture for those people who have little or no knowledge of 'things Maori'. To help us decide we thought it would be helpful to produce a list of criteria which we wanted our product to achieve for us and this proved to be the factor which decided our final product.

1. Seven of the eight team members are Maori so it was an absolute for the product to promote an aspect of things Maori.
2.It must also be a product which we could produce once and then be able to focus on the marketing and selling of the product with minimum extra production work.
3.It must have little or no competition in our market.
4.There must be a need for it.
5.It must be able to generate a good rate of return on our investment.
6.Most important, it must be fun to do so that we could all give it 100%!

We completed market research sending out 100 questionnaires with 37 being returned. The feedback was really valuable and included ideas we could include on the DVD, one even took the trouble to write a letter to us because they thought the idea was so good and they wanted us to think carefully about the tone and mana which we should create with the video. Only two replies said that they did not want us to contact them with a view to purchase when the product was ready to go to market.