Interviews and Collaging- Daisy Horr

This week Comfort4U has been getting “artsy-fartsy,” scavenging some architectural design magazines for images that reflect the goals of our marketing team. Some main images we have cut out include several chair designs to reflect how Comfort4U aims to take the standard chair, and extend it to become much more useful and appealing to the user. We have also highlighted how we aim to market towards schools in Austin (shown by out “Best of the City” image) and the cutout of the girl profile with chairs and descriptive words describing our chair cover (such as “unique,” “innovative”, etc) really reflects how our team began the process, which was simply how to brainstorm way to make a typical everyday chair, better.

We have also invested some time taking into consideration some of the main points we received from our interview with our school’s head administers Ms.Waugh and Ms.Wiersema about how to make our product appealing to schools in AISD.  We learned that while marketing towards school admin is important, we should also consider marketing towards parents and counselors, using very specific data to show how our product will benefit the students both healthwise and education-wise. When we are presenting data on how our product helps students, Ms.Wiersema emphasized that specific concrete data is the best way to approach the subject, such as how the new chair covers increased the average student attendance or percentages of improved schoolwork performance, with more emphasis on increased attendance performance because many schools get grants and funding depending on the average amount of student attendance. Ms.Waugh described an article she read about the horrifying amount of time students typically spend sitting every day, and she encouraged us to explore this topic because it could be something that would really grab the attention of school heads and parents alike. From what we already know, the average student spend more time sitting at around 8 hours, than sleeping! Some of our thinking is to use startling-but true!-facts and data about sitting and it’s harmful effect to grab the attention of our customers (school admin, teachers counselors, etc). There was one Ted Talks video about the harmful effects of sitting with some facts that could be helpful to add to our marketing. I think that the next steps are to explore our customer’s needs and wants in a chair cushion, and to work together with our research and tech team on gathering as much data as we can to support our product.