We're going to try something new here at AdJab. Each week we'll examine The Apprentice from an advertising perspective, such as how the marketing impacted the success or failure of a task, or how the teams handled the task for a company that has been integrated within the show.

There's this sort of cockeyed conventional wisdom in business that great leadership is what produces great products, but it's bad marketing that kills worthwhile ideas. It's always easy to pick on marketing since it's kind of tough to define what was done, what the intended results were and how those results were/were not accomplished.
So it was no surprise that the losing team on the season premiere of the Los Angeles edition of "The Apprentice" first blamed the lack of marketing support for their failure to attract enough customers to their car wash. It wasn't the fault of the sales team, it was the marketing team that failed to attract enough dirty cars in the first place. Never mind that the price point likely wasn't high enough and that the team members were pretty much clueless as to how to wash a car. I'm sure it was the lack of fliers that caused the team to fail.

Would more marketing hustle likely have paid off in more cars being washed? Possibly, but the same could be said for a higher price being set or someone trying a different approach when trying to upsell a customer to a more expensive service. But it's not surprising that the person who said that marketing was to blame had no specifics to offer and the person on the defensive had no ability to defend himself intelligently on that point. No one on the team, which is made up of self-described multi-millionaires and lawyers and other vague professionals, is really in marketing.

All that aside, there needs to be some other facet to a marketing plan, even one that's just for a quick car wash business, than copied fliers. There's so much wrong with how these people view marketing (hand out paper to anyone who walks by regardless of whether or not they're IN THEY'RE CARS!!!) that it's obvious some people just don't get it. If they can't handle a relatively neutral task like this then I'm not hopeful for how the tasks that revolve around an actual company are going to turn out.

Should be a fun season if this is how we're starting out.