Marketing Mix Remix: Relaunch the Boring
A paperclip. Pensioners who love cruises. Ten minutes. Go. Teams draw one deeply boring product and one wildly specific target market, then remix all four Ps to make the pairing genuinely sellable. The pitches are ridiculous, the thinking underneath is pure marketing mix.
How to run it
Each team draws (or is assigned) ONE product card and ONE target market card at random. No swaps, no matter how absurd the pairing. The absurdity is the exercise.
Teams must decide: Product (how do we adapt or rebrand it for this market?), Price (what price and pricing strategy, with one sentence of justification?), Place (where exactly would this market buy it?), Promotion (one campaign idea and one slogan). All four must appear in the pitch or points are lost.
Each team pitches to the class in 90 seconds max. Slogans must be delivered with full commitment. Props improvised from pencil cases are strongly encouraged.
Everyone votes twice: once for funniest pitch and once for the pitch most likely to actually work. Teams cannot vote for themselves. The two awards usually go to different teams, which sets up the debrief question: what separates entertaining marketing from effective marketing?
Pick the winning most-likely-to-work pitch and map it on the board against the four Ps. Ask: which P did the winners nail? Which P do weak pitches always ignore? (It is almost always Place.) Link to segmentation: the market card forced targeting, and targeting is what made the ideas sharp.
🖨 8 boring product cards
- P1. A single steel paperclip
- P2. A plain white mug
- P3. A bar of unscented soap
- P4. A wooden 30cm ruler
- P5. A pack of 100 rubber bands
- P6. A grey umbrella
- P7. A tin of value baked beans
- P8. A basic ballpoint pen
🖨 12 target market cards
- M1. Pensioners who love cruise holidays
- M2. Professional gamers and streamers
- M3. New parents running on no sleep
- M4. Fitness influencers who post everything
- M5. Festival-goers who camp all weekend
- M6. City bankers with more money than time
- M7. Eco-conscious university students
- M8. Dog owners who treat the dog like a child
- M9. Long-distance lorry drivers
- M10. Wedding planners under pressure
- M11. Twelve-year-olds with pocket money
- M12. People terrified of technology
🖨 Judging card (project for the vote)
| Question | Look for |
|---|---|
| Did the pitch cover all four Ps? | Product change, price with a reason, a specific place, one promotion idea + slogan |
| Was the target market actually targeted? | Details that only fit THIS market, not everyone |
| Funniest pitch vote | Commitment, slogan delivery, props |
| Most likely to work vote | Would real people in this market genuinely buy it? |
Variations
- Budget constraint: give each team an imaginary £5,000 marketing budget and make them state what the promotion actually costs.
- Hostile takeover round: after pitches, teams get 60 seconds to explain how they would beat ONE rival pitch in the same market.
- Premium remix: the same product must be pitched twice, once as the cheapest option in the market and once as a luxury version, showing how price repositions a product.
Teacher tips
- Enforce the no-swap rule kindly but firmly. The paperclip-for-bankers team always complains and then produces the best pitch.
- Keep a visible countdown for the 10 planning minutes; scarcity of time produces braver ideas.
- Save the best slogans on a classroom wall of fame. Next year's classes will try to beat them, and the activity markets itself.
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