YogaBugs - stretching credibility

I watched the Dragon's Den on TV tonight. I was intrigued by the yoga product for kids called YogaBugs. The idea was good; the numbers were sound; the Dragons lined up to make offers to the slick, media friendly women behind the idea.

In the end the offers were turned down. The investors wanted 30% of the equity when 15% had been offered. 295,000.00 Euro was on the table. That is 570,051 NZ dollars.

When the women left I couldn't help but feel they never really wanted the money.
The business was in good shape, cash flow was positive, there was market interest in the product and the timing was right. The women were very well schooled on presentation techniques. Their 15 minutes of fame were crucial (in my opinion) to getting what they wanted - and it wasn't investment from the panel of Dragons.

I guess the show rates quite well in the UK. It has come back for another season and is licensed around the world - we've seen the Australian and New Zealand versions. If you click on the newspaper article you should be able to read the copy - at the end of the story is the comment that the women couldn't believe their 2 and a half hour presentation was condensed down to 12 minutes of airtime...Um...hello...? The media value of that time must have been hundreds of thousands of Euro if it had been bought on the spot market for ads. Turning the Dragons down created a secondary media interest and offered them a good psychological position from which to negotiate in private with other investors. Because the brand was quite well established the risk of leaking the concept into the public domain (yoga for kids is not protectable) it was a winning strategy that I can't believe wasn't preplanned. Let's not kid ourselves otherwise.

As a footnote I don't think there has been 12 minutes of airtime devoted to the humanitarian Crisis (read genocide) in Darfur on all of New Zealand's free to air broadcast TV channels put together in the past month.

Comments

Addict-o-matic

A cool resource for you to try. Aggregates search topics from a number of sources. Thanks to Brand DNA (again) for the heads-up.

Johnny Bunko competiton

The Great Johnny Bunko Challenge from DHP on Vimeo . There's a young chap in Indiana, one Alec Quig , who has written to me about creating a career based on a polymathic degree, from which he has recently graduated. He's an interesting young man and his concerns about going forward in life are the anxieties we all face at crossroads in our lives when we are forced to make choices. Dan Pink's latest book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need might help: "From a New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Washington Post bestselling author comes a first-of-its- kind career guide for a new generation of job seekers.There's never been a career guide like it.the fully illustrated story (ingeniously told in Manga form) of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job. Johnny Bunko is new to parachute company Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early days as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to find a new job. St

Sexist Advertising and stereotypes

Advertising lives in the short-form world. Because mass media is so expensive the 30 second commercial is conventional and because there is so much clutter simplified signals are essential to 'cut through'. One form of communication short-hand used as a default is the stereotype - "A stereotype can be a conventional and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image, based on the assumption that there are attributes that members of the "other group" have in common. Stereotypes are sometimes formed by a previous illusory correlation, a false association between two variables that are loosely correlated if correlated at all. Though generally viewed as negative perceptions, stereotypes may be either positive or negative in tone." In the 1950's and 60's when men dominated advertising stereotypical impressions of women as inferior or subservient were not only commonplace but usual. It was normal to show women as housekeepers, largely because most wer

ThoughtSpurs

Search This Blog