I thought about both teams' marketing efforts and felt that overall they were even. The fact is that both came in $11 dollars apart. For a one-time class, that's pretty even 51-49, though a win is a win.

The 'flyer' thing is overdone, but I can understand it. In the brief period of time these teams have to pull off a task on a limited budget, about the only thing you can do is print flyers, maybe a few posters, and depending on the regulations - an email blast. There are also other possibilities, but it's probably a moot point right now. It therefore comes down to the design of those materials and then putting them into the right person's hand - your target customer.

I think the key problem here is that neither team diversified their target market. They each put all of their eggs into one basket: the women, people who are not yet Bally's customers and the men, people already Bally's customers. The $11 difference tells me both sets of targets were viable and I can only imagine what the potential profit would have been had one team balanced the approach to both targets.

As lousy as the XXX print was, it did generate an audience, primarily of outsiders. (That, in it of itself, is impressive especially since they didn't know if the person on the street exercised.) But, if they had taken a few minutes to determine that both the inside and outside Bally's were possibilities (focus group) XXX might never have been the ad focus. Instead, they could have developed the flyer announcing the class, offered a discount to current Bally's members, and still distributed the flyers to both markets.

For the men, again, ignoring the potential person on the street was a misfire. They offered no discount to current customer's (who can take usual Bally's classes for free). Another minus (IIRC) is that by focusing on this group, they never asked a key question - what time of day would work best for this class?

The last thing, and while it had no bearing on the win/loss of the task but does in cultivating business relationships - is why was there no post-evaluation of the class with the customers? Heck, here's another thing the teams could have done -with the walk-ins, come to the class and receive a free two-week pass to Bally's (which you get after filling out the eval) and to current members, come to the class, fill out the eval, be entered into a drawing for a free two months, which I'm sure Bally's would sponsor at no cost - after all they're getting information about what people want. Bally's might even become a sponsor for a later task (rickshaw advertising) because of the positive overall feeling left by the teams. It's a dot all i's cross all t's.

I just find, overall, the marketing technique in these shows to be completely lacking though Kendra was one of the best when she was utilized in that capacity.