Final Advert!

Check out our final advert… enjoy!

A Tasty Little Recipe…

What do you get if you mix together:

- one bowl of custard,

- one hungry boy,

- one pint of beer,

- three hungry girls,

- a jar of Marmite,

… and a video camera…?

The Temptation Magazine Advert! Enjoy!

AC’s Rock and Role

Marketing Director

The main tasks that I have been responsible for, so far in the process, are to be in head of, organize and perform all of the research for Temptation Magazine.  This has involved market research; consumer needs and wants as well as an understanding of the personas of our segments, which has constituted the main developments of out three personas. This research was divided into to parts; a quantitative survey (about 123 responses) and a round of smaller interviews (conversations if you want – respond rate 40 students).  As the business began evolving into a web page and events, my main tasks within research have been to get feedback and understand the segments once more. This has been done by talking (interviewing) multiple students. So far it has been divided into 3 rounds:

1)      Feedback on, brand name and semiotics, design and content

1. Pre and post research

2)      Feedback on becoming a web page

1. Pre
2. Post: feedback on design, content, navigation, usability

3)      Research on dining events

1. Price, how many events, where, “price for what”, “what is it worth to you”
2. Need for themes, mm. ?

Parallel to this my job has been to integrate the findings into Temptation magazine,  by ensuring that the editor in chief as well as the art director were aware of the findings and understood the market, so that they would be able to integrate this into their work. Furthermore my job has been to relate research and the work of Temptation to our general marketing plan, especially relating it to objectives, positioning and targeting.

In order to promote (and sell) Temptation Magazine to the local restaurants in Kingston I have been responsible for approaching these alongside with the financial director. This has been done twice;

1)      Pre Christmas: trying to sell adverts to restaurants – without any luck

2)      Feb: promoting and organizing our idea of events to restaurants – so far we have spotted a positive interest, and we are planning on following up on this with telephone calls and meetings, shortly.

The part of promoting Temptation to the KU students is just to begin. In relation to this I imagine that I will be in charge of deciding on the communication and promotion strategy, media selection and messages. Off cause I imagine this will occur in agreement and in participation with the rest of the Temptation group. The general idea is to go for a rapid promotion strategy, hoping to generate high awareness and interest on a low budget and in a short amount of time. This will properly be done by using free online mediums (emails, facebook, twitter and so on) and by small on campus events.

Jam’s role within Temptation

 

As Editor in Chief of Temptation, I am mainly in charge of the overall content of Temptation. I am responsible for ensuring that te standards of Temptation are met and maintained, and that the content of the magazine is of interest to our target audience. I also work with the other team members in other aspects of the magazine, such as market research, sales pitches, financial matters, and get involved with pretty much everything to do with Temptation.

 Responsibilities and tasks include…

-       Writing material for the website, such as articles, website content, comments, etc.

-       Writing material for all things Temptation including promotional leaflets, flyers, sales profile, etc.

-       Proofreading and editing articles received from contributing writers.

-       Selecting topics to be covered by Temptation and suggesting article ideas and themes.

-       Final editing of all content and reviewing layout.

-       Setting and enforcing deadlines for team members

-       Maintaining the consistency of Temptation as a brand.

-       Working on an issue plan/timeline for the website.

-       Revising articles, and writing headlines and captions.

-       Working closely with the creative director on the direction of the website and the overall look in terms of images, content, layout and segmentation of the magazine.

-       Carrying out the necessary and relative research.

-       Reviewing, correcting and tweaking the website’s content.

-       Supervising the process to keep the magazine on schedule and constantly updated.

-       Contributing to market research in terms of constantly communicating with our target audience; asking them what they think of the magazine so far, what their suggestions are and what they want to see more of in Temptation.

Alice’s Role within ‘Temptation’

My official job title within our team is the ‘Creative Director’. I take responsibility for the ‘look’ of the brand. So far, these responsibilities have been varied, including the following…

- designing the logo for the brand, (including choosing fonts to use on all published material)

- designing and organising the printing of advertising materials, including business cards, postcards and advertising leaflets

- designing and prototyping the artwork for the magazine, from front covers (when we originally envisaged a paper-published format), to the style and design of the individual articles

- setting up, designing the style of, and maintaining our team blog and website

- setting up, and maintaining our business email address, twitter account and facebook group

- creating powerpoint presentations and videos for class presentations

- designing the layout for the December Tradefair booth

Basically, my role so far has ended up as a combination of both artistic and technical responsibilities, keeping things ticking over as far both the content and design of the magazine are concerned, but also involving the social media/contact areas of Temptation. It makes sense for me to take control of both of these areas, in order to keep a consistency across the design of the content and the website, also allowing new content and information to be made available to the public as soon as possible. Via feedback from our Marketing Director, I am able to adjust the brand visuals accordingly as each new area of the business is developed.

Harry Owen-Jones – Publishing Director

Job Description

 

Company Description: Temptation Magazine is an online platform which provides up to date news, information and entertainment for Kingston’s student population for all things food and drink.

 

Publishing Director

As Publishing Director my role is to provide all the financial accounting for the magazine as well as collaborating with the Marketing Director on the sales side of the business. I have also been involved with providing content for the online magazine and playing a full part in all team meetings.

Responsibilities Include:

-          Setting up of the business banking  accounts with HSBC

-          Compiling year-end accounting which is to include the compilation of Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet statements

-          Compilation of Management Accounts including budgeting and Forecasting

-          Acting as Treasurer for the company accounts

-          Dealing with any legal issues as and when they arise

-          Appraching stakeholders, (typically local restaurants, bars and pubs), to win advertising

-          Working alongside stakeholders to put on specific nights

-          Providing content for the online magazine

-          Playing a full part in all team meetings

An essential part of the job has been being able to work as part of a small team and provide feedback on all areas of the business.

December Fun for Temptation Magazine

Temptation were extremely pleased to win the prize for Best Postgraduate Stall at the Young Enterprise-sponsored Trade Fair at Kingston University in December!

As well as winning a lovely certificate and a cash prize, we sold goodie-bags containing cupcakes, postcards and Christmas loveliness to members of the public, which means we are making a profit for the first time since our business was set up!

Check out Corrine’s video of the evening below…

Over Christmas we’ve been mainly working on content and design for the magazine, in order to launch the first online edition of the magazine before the end of January. Watch this space!

There’s no ‘i’ in ‘Team’, but there is in ‘Time’…

In our meeting today, we laid all our cards on the table and made a comprehensive list of all the tasks he have finished, just started, and not even thought about yet! Working around our schedules, and when team members are available over the Christmas period, we were able to create a rough timeline for the progress of the business over the next few weeks…

As our timeline shows, our focus for the next few weeks is based around preparing the first (prototype) issue so that we can begin to distribute it/publish it online before the University Christmas vacation begins. When this happens, the magazine will take on various forms…

- CD Package (see the research and development page for a prototype video). This version of the magazine will be in a fairly small print run (although we are unsure of the exact numbers, as we are still waiting for a quote from Stardiscs, our potential supplier). We will ideally have between 50-100 copies of this physical version of the magazine, which we can hand out to potential advertisers/sponsors/distributors. We can also use this version as a form of market research, showing it to members of our target audience in order to gauge the reaction of a physical vs. electronic product.

- ISSUU.com through a link attached to our website, the viewer would be taken to issuu.com, an online publishing platform which would enable us to display pdf versions of the magazine pages.

- Business Cards by distributing business cards (free from vistaprint.com, already designed and ordered, see below) we hope to spread the brand name and image amongst out target audience, and again, have a tangible product which we can physically hand to the consumer.

 

As usual, please check our ‘Video Diary‘ page for the latest instalment from this week’s group meeting!

New Videos…

Check out our new video diary (on the video diaries page, surprise!), and a new video showing a prototype for the new magazine format on the ‘Research and Development’ page. Enjoy!

[insert food-related 'feed'-back pun here].

Last week, the Temptation Team had the opportunity to show the rest of the group what we’re made of… a video which didn’t work very well. But in all seriousness, it was brilliant to have a platform to show the work we’ve been doing so far, and also to get some much needed feedback from Corrine and the rest of the class.

It was quite a tricky session, as it seemed as though our group (we were second from last) didn’t get as much time as the others for feedback from the class. However, after a bit of an appeal for comments from fellow MACErs on Facebook and Twitter dealt us a multitude of responses. Main points seemed to focus on the development of an online/electronic product (which we are in the process of developing now – oh so ridiculously excited!) We have various ideas on the go at the moment, ranging from a purely online magazine in website format, advertised online or by business-card style handouts, to a pdf magazine (looking at platforms such as issuu.com) available to download from a website, or distributed on a CD (in some pretty nifty wallets, including 8 pages which could act as a mini-magazine, hello tiny tear-out recipes!)

With this approach to the presentation of the ‘magazine’, we are not only producing a product which is far more interesting and innovative than other potential competitors, but it also leaves us open to be alot more creative with the design and presentation of the finished product.

We’re in the process of getting quotes from stardiscs.co.uk, who look like a perfect supplier if that is the road we choose to go down, and we’ve registered the domain name temptationmagazine.co.uk – website coming soon! With all of these options, we address the issues raised in the feedback from our presentations, the fact that we DO need to move into the 20th Century and go with the flow when it comes to doing things electronically, and not jump the gun. Producing a prototype magazine as a first issues is by far the most cost-effective way of testing our business strategy, and will also provide us with a physical product to show potential advertisers (and hopefully raise our profits!)

In our group meeting, we discussed the possibility that we may have set off a bit hard, a bit soon, and not given ourselves much room for compromise away from our initial ideas. We have now realised that the whole ‘fail early and fail often’ idea is not necessarily true of our team, but we are now aware that our earlier organisation may have actually been hindering us a tad. However, we feel that we are now definitely back on track with a far more feasible, exciting and innovative potential product.

F.Y.I – this is the song we have been listening to this week in order to get ourselves back on track. Enjoy.