12A - Figuring Out Buyer Behavior No. 1

My segment will be just lacto-ovo vegetarians, and for the purposes of this assignment I will exclude vegans, people with allergies, and people on other diets like keto and Atkins.

I interviewed three vegetarians who are also students at UF. I got the results I expected from these interviews, because they all have had on experience or another like my marshmallow incident (discovering that a food wasn't actually vegetarian long after implementing the diet). One of the interviewees even told me that the broccoli cheddar soup at Panera is made with chicken stock, and therefore isn't vegetarian (oops). So, my app idea would have benefited them (and myself, RIP Panera). massively in truthfully sticking to the vegetarian diet.




yikes
(I've been eating broccoli cheese soup the whole 2 years I've been vegetarian)

The times and places people have this problem the most is at restaurants. At grocery stores there is time to google a specific food product to find out if it's vegetarian or not, but at restaurants it's more convoluted. If a menu doesn't mark vegetarian options, the consumer has to scan all the items and see if anything doesn't list meat in the ingredients (if the menu even lists any). Then, if it is still unclear, the consumer has to ask the waitress to ask the chef if it is vegetarian, which turns into a big ordeal. Even then, if the waitress comes back and says it is, there's always the risk that the chef uses chicken broth to cook with instead of vegetable broth, so a food item might even still, surprisingly, have meat in it in some form. For example, stuffing that may not appear to have meat in it on the surface might not be vegetarian because it was cooked with chicken broth instead of vegetable broth, even though there's no tangible meat within the stuffing.

Like stated in the previous paragraph, when my segment of consumers discovers their unmet need (not knowing whether or not a product is vegetarian), they turn to google or ask the waiter to ask the chef. In both cases, the results might be unclear or outright incorrect. If they use google, they search "is _ vegetarian".

What I learned from these interviews is that my focus should shift away from grocery store food products to restaurants and fast food chains (hardly any fast food chains have vegetarian options besides salad, and even then you have to ask for it without any ham or bacon on top).



what a nice meat salad
*Shout-out to Wendy's for selling a baked potato. Wendy's is the only fast food I can ever eat *

Anyway, I am definitely going to have to shift my app's focus to be a companion for restaurant menus, or possibly consider even creating a vegetarian restaurant where all the food options are varied; the companion app for my restaurant would go into detail as to the preparation and ingredients involved for a more transparent consumer experience.

I would describe (with more specificity) this segment as lacto-ovo vegetarian consumers who eat out, based on the findings in my interviews.

13A - Reading Reflection - Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel

1.) What surprised me the most was Chanel's ties with the Nazis, and the fact that she was accepted by the American fashion industry even after that. What I admired most was that everything she designed was classic, and she cared about style, not trends or fads. I also admired that she drew inspiration in her designs from her rough childhood (from being an orphan in the convent). What I least admired was her willingness to become an informant for the Nazis during the French occupation. Some might say it was her willingness to survive, but others made better choices in the same situation (fleeing, fighting back, double crossing the Nazis, helping Jews escape France, etc). It seems like she actually sympathized with the Nazis and their ideals. Coco Chanel did encounter adversity, and it seems that the roughest patch in her career was a Paris fashion show that was supposed to be her reintroduction into the fashion industry after WW2- it bombed. French critics rejected her designs as outdated, but she ultimately found success in American consumers instead, so she took advantage of her popularity in America.

2.) She expressed competency in sewing (which she learned how to do in the convent), and creating a product that became timeless. To create a style that lasts decades after she started, and even decades after her death is truly a legendary accomplishment. She also showed competency in creating a product that was functional, aesthetically pleasing, and comfortable for her audience, which is a hard intersection to create. She helped rid women of corsets, which probably actually helped with their health (corsets squeeze women's vital organs and shorten their life expectancy).

3.) One part that was confusing to me was the whole Nazi-occupied France era, and its aftermath. I can't understand how she was able to ever show her face in public again after the scandal of having been in with the Nazis and basically betraying France. I guess scandal didn't quite catch fire back then like it does now- maybe ethical consumerism is a more recent development with the internet.

4.) My two questions would probably be why she colluded with Nazis (for survival, or because she actually agreed with them), and if she was ever actually in love with the men she was with throughout her life. I would ask the first question because I would want insight as to her intentions, and I would ask the second question because she never married, but it seemed like she was particularly attached to her first lover (the man who she opened her hat shop with and who inspired her revolutionary jersey suits for women).

5.) I think her opinion of hard work was that it was the key to success. She never stopped designing and pursuing her career in fashion for her whole life- you could say she was married to her career rather than any of her lovers. I don't necessarily agree with this outlook. I don't think working to death will make a person happy. While she achieved legendary status within fashion and is considered a feminist icon, I'm not sure if she was ever truly happy, or if she died happy. It seems to me like she put her work before her happiness, or perhaps pursued work so much because she thought it would bring her happiness. Either way, it seems like she was actually pretty bitter and unhappy.

11A - Idea Napkin 1

This assignment is going off my app idea for AR (augmented reality) that uses filters to determine if a food product falls under a certain diet.

1) My talents include artistic talent (graphic design & drawing, but not really painting so much), musical talent/ability to compose my own music and play piano, a fairly strong background in literature and writing, the ability to perform well under pressure, and good interviewing/pitching skills from my years involved in theatre and dance. I have an internship at the DHS under my belt, and also graduated from a Law magnet at my high school. I speak Spanish as a second language. My major is Sustainability and the Built Environment, so I've taken classes regarding environmental science, interior design, international sustainability (how different governments interact with environmental policies), and basic architecture. I hope to use this to eventually get involved with environmental public policy in the U.S., whether that means working in the EPA or working for a well-respected nonprofit organization. This app/business would help promote sustainability by allowing vegetarians and vegans to navigate grocery stores with greater ease (vegetarian and vegan diets are substantially more sustainable than an omnivorous diet). I'm not sure how this endeavor would fit into my career, it's all still a little fuzzy and feels far away, even though I know it isn't. I'm still trying to figure out my aspirations in life, to be completely honest.
2) I'm offering customers a product that would cut down time spent scanning each food item for ingredients, and looking up each ingredient to see what it means. This would relieve a lot of the stress induced by shopping on a vegetarian/vegan diet, and would also hopefully help people realize that some food items actually are veg friendly, opening new doors for dishes and promoting a more balanced diet without nutrient deficiencies.
3) I would be offering this product to people who have a specific diet, primarily vegetarians and vegans but I could also expand to include other diets (like kosher, Atkins, nut-free, gluten-free, keto, and paleo diets). These are people who want to be conscious of what is going into their body, but get worn down and tired of constantly scanning food items for ingredients, especially when transitioning to a new diet or trying a new food product they've never had before. I know I personally didn't realize that marshmallows aren't actually vegetarian and I freaked out because I'd been eating them, so my product would help prevent mistakes like that from happening for people who are also on specific diets.
4) My clients would think this product would be valuable to them because not breaking their diet is valuable to them. Personally, I'd use this product because of the marshmallow incident. There is also value in the time saved by not having to google every ingredient in a product just to make sure it's "safe" to eat. People pay for products like gym memberships and consultations with nutritionists, so this app would definitely also be of enough value to pay for to that same group of people.
5) What sets me apart is that I am a part of my target audience. I know the problems this group of people has while shopping, what is the most time consuming and tedious, and what is the most annoying. I don't have any business experience or programming skills however, so that would be a major weakness. I'd have to bring other people on board to make my idea happen, and by then I would probably have to compromise some of my idea. I'd have an advantage in having graphic design experience/knowledge, because I could make a clean, aesthetically pleasing, and user-friendly app that is easier to navigate than the food apps that are currently on the market (I have them all, and trust me, they could all improve their graphic design and user-friendliness). However, having an eye for design isn't something that only I have, there are other people in the world and even just at UF who also have artistic talent, so it's not necessarily something that makes me unique, but it would help build my brand into something unique, if that makes sense.

I actually think that most of my idea's "parts" fit together well, but something that doesn't quite fit is not knowing what my career path will end up being and not necessarily wanting to get into entrepreneurship or business. I feel like that adds up to me selling my idea for someone else to pursue, but if that happens the idea will change as they make it their own. So I'm not exactly sure how realistic my idea is or if it will fit into my own life and goals. My app would help promote sustainability on one hand, but on the other it just doesn't quite line up with the type of work I want to do.

9A - Testing the Hypothesis, Part 2

In this entry, I will continue assessing the issues with the RTS bus app and my hypothesis.
The people I will interview are students who use the RTS app, but who have not experienced the problems that I have.

Summary of interviews:

E: Interviewee E said that he uses the bus frequently, to get to work. He is right in the middle of a route and lives/works on campus, so he usually has wifi. He doesn't experience any problems with the app because he isn't near the ends of any routes (where drives take breaks), and he doesn't experience issues with loading the app since he always has wifi when he uses the app. For him, the app is able to accurately predict when the bus will come.
B: Interviewee B said that she experiences no issues with the RTS app, but misses the bus sometimes anyway because she just doesn't leave her house early enough, then has to call an uber. She lives off campus, has an unlimited data plan, and doesn't live near the ends of any routes.
A: Interviewee A said that he hardly uses the buses, but when he does it's during high-traffic times. His problem is not with the RTS app itself, but with buses getting too full to accept more passengers at the Reitz and then having to wait for the next bus. However, he has never had issues with the app because when he is at the Reitz he has UF wifi, and he lives on campus so he bikes or walks more often than takes the bus.
N: Interviewee N said that she only really takes the bus at night when she doesn't want to walk in the dark, so she doesn't use the RTS bus app very often. When she has used it in the past, it has worked. She does not have unlimited data, but said she hardly uses data anyway and doesn't use her phone much outside of texting. She lives off campus.
M: Interviewee M said that he uses the RTS bus app almost every day (mostly on weekdays), but he always gets on the bus at high traffic times so he hardly ever even has to check the RTS bus app because his bus comes so frequently.

WHO: People who fall outside the boundary of the problem I'm addressing (but who are very similar to my audience) are people who use the RTS bus system but who have consistent access to high-speed LTE or wifi, who only take the bus during high traffic times when there are more buses and stop more frequently, and who live closer to the middle of the routes than the ends (closer to campus). The person can be inside my boundary if one or more of those three factors is not true.

WHAT: The need is for the app to account for bus drivers' breaks and become more reliable in tracking the buses. The need is not as prevalent during high traffic times when buses come more frequently and towards the middle of routes where drivers don't take breaks.

WHY: The need exists when the tracking on the app is sporadic and inaccurate, and when the ETA of the bus at a bus stop doesn't account for the time that the bus is off on break at the end of a route. An alternate explanation is that someone's LTE or wifi connection is weak or nonexistent at the bus stop.

8A - Solving the Problem

The problem I am going to try to solve in this post is the problem of vegetarians, vegans, and other forms of specific diets cannot immediately tell if there are meat (or other) products in a food item. Countless hours are spent researching which food items are okay to eat, which are surprisingly not (for example, marshmallows and Jello are not vegetarian/vegan, because they have gelatin in them, which is made with hooves). Sometimes a food product doesn't explicitly say in the ingredients that it is made with meat products or meaty broth, and as a vegetarian I am constantly scrutinizing over whether or not I'm eating something that vegetarian or not (and it's even worse for vegans).

Ideally, I would want to make an app that takes advantage of augmented reality technology. You would be able to hold up your phone to a food product in the grocery store, and the app would have "filters", meaning depending on the filter you use, it could tell you if a food item is vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, nut-free, kosher, lactose free, or not. People with nut allergies could use the nut-free filter, people who have celiac could use the gluten-free filter. I'm not 100% sure if this is possible with current technology, but that's my idea, since existing food apps usually just have you type in a specific product and scroll through all the variations and brands of that product that come up in the results. Those apps don't really save any time, because I still waste a lot of time scrolling through the results to find what I actually need, and even then those apps are for calorie tracking and seeing the composition of ingredients, rather than seeing if the product meets the standards of a particular diet. Using QR codes rather than augmented reality for each filter would make more sense logistically, but isn't as cool. If AR isn't realistic for right now, I stand by my idea but with QR codes on food products that can be scanned. This would require cooperation with big food companies, which would be really hard to work out, but ultimately it would be to their benefit as well because it would help them sell more products if they could advertise them as app-friendly.

7A - Testing the Hypothesis, Part 1

     The opportunity I've picked is how many labels on foods are convoluted or are described in scientific terms that make it hard to understand whether a type of food is vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, kosher, or have certain allergens in them. For anyone who has a specific diet, it is always a tedious process reading the labels on food and trying to figure out if it meets your dietary standards or not.

The who: Vegetarians, vegans, people with severe allergies, people with lactose or gluten intolerance, and people who eat a kosher diet (or anyone else who has a specific diet that means they need to know what's in their food in an understandable and quick way).

The what: It takes forever to analyze labels with a million ingredients with scientific terms, trying to figure out exactly what is in food and whether or not it can be eaten or not. This also applies to restaurant menus that don't specify what is in dishes or how they are prepared.

The why: Labeling laws from the FDA don't necessarily require restaurants or big food packaging companies to list ingredients in an easy-to-comprehend or immediately identifiable way.

Hypothesis: Food labeling convolutes which ingredients are in food, and people with specific diets waste time analyzing whether or not a specific food item or dish falls under their diet.

Testing the who: People of other religions like Sikhism, or even people with medications that restrict what they can eat

Testing the what: Maybe the problem isn't labeling everything better on each specific item, but maybe the problem is that there aren't more stores or restaurants catering to specific diets. If there were more restaurants or grocery stores that catered to a specific diet or allergy and only sold goods that met that diet's standards, then someone could just walk in and buy whatever food they wanted without having to worry about the ingredients list.

Testing the why: Maybe instead of labeling laws enforced by the FDA, the real root of the problem is average consumers not knowing enough about nutrition to understand the names of the ingredients on the label.

Interviews Summary: Overall, I found that even people without specific food diets hate reading the label and tying to figure out what ingredients are in the product or whether or not the food is healthy or not. People with food allergies also spend a lot of time scanning labels for red flags, and people with religious diets like koshher go to restaurants that are Jewish or get food from their Temple to avoid wasting time trying to figure out if a product is considered part of their diet or not. People who are vegetarian and vegan have the most trouble in restaurants, because if a server does not know if something meets their diet standards or not, then they have to go ask a manager and it becomes a big deal. Also, sometimes a product is made with chicken broth as opposed to vegetable broth, and that's not usually listed as an ingredient on menus.

6A - Identifying Opportunities in Economic & Regulatory Trends

http://www.businessinsider.com/no-gas-tax-increase-in-trump-infrastructure-plan-to-avoid-gop-tax-bill-2018-2 

1.) My first economic problem (opportunity) is that during Trump's SOTU address he announced a plan to cut taxes and create $1.5 billion in infrastructure investment over the next 10 years, but he did not reveal where he intends to get the funds to do so from.
a. This source is from Business Insider, but the source of my opportunity belief was from watching the SOTU and realizing that he was just announcing major changes with no actual plan that financially backed up those changes.
b. This information suggests that an opportunity might exist because there are a lot of different sources that Trump could use to fund these plans, but those sources (for example, a tax on gas was mentioned in the article) would be met with outrage and economic stagnation, depending on where he takes those funds from. If he cuts more programs to afford this plan, there will be social backlash. There are solutions to this problem, and maybe those solutions could be pitched to a representative or someone within the bureaucracy.
c. The "customer" in this case could be protesters or even just voters who have the chance to make suggestions to their representatives as to which programs should be protected and which ones should be cut to afford this plan (or even write to the representatives that this plan should not be in the works at all).
d. This opportunity is relatively difficult (some might argue impossible) to argue because it is pretty well known that Trump does not usually heed the advice of his constituents or Congress. Also, only some representatives actually heed the advice of their constituents.

Someone might not see an opportunity after reading this article if they are pessimistic about how much influence we have over our government. Someone could easily read this article and just get angry but not think that there's anything that can be done about it.

https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/11/daily-chart-17?zid=295&ah=0bca374e65f2354d553956ea65f756e0

2.) My second economic problem (opportunity) is that income inequality in the U.S. is rising, and steadily has been for the past millennia.
a. My source for this problem is from the Economist, but my source for the opportunity is the fact that I personally think that income inequality is at an unacceptable level right now in the U.S. There are other countries that have higher levels of egalitarianism in their governments and I can't help but wish that the U.S. would follow suit.
b. I believe that this opportunity exists because of the massive and sudden appeal of Bernie Sanders (a democratic socialist) in the 2016 election, and to some extent the election of Trump. Trump stole Sanders' message of a grassroots revolution and coined the phrase "drain the swamp". So, Sanders' surprising popularity and Trump's success in the election definitely indicate that Americans are tired of income inequality.
c. The "customer" in this case would be U.S. citizens who are dissatisfied with the levels of  income inequality within the U.S., maybe specifically people who struggle financially (the lower and middle class perhaps).
d. This opportunity is also ridiculously hard to exploit, because it depends on radically changing certain aspect of our government, which would require overwhelming support and a lot of protesting in order to get representatives to make any changes.

Someone might not have seen this opportunity if they don't care about income inequality or are themselves part of the top 1% who benefit from this system.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/us/politics/trump-immigration.html

3.) My third problem (opportunity), which is related to regulation, is about the recent announcement that Trump intends to heavily restrict immigration to the U.S. moving forward. Some intended regulations are unclear, as in the SOTU he specified that he intended to keep immigrants from bringing distant relatives over even though they already aren't allowed to do that.
a. My source was the New York Times, but my source of opportunity belief was knowing that a lot of people would be kept from immigrating to the U.S. and might even die as a result, especially if their home country is war-torn or starving.
b. I was led to believe that this opportunity exists because many immigrants do want to bring their children or spouse when they come to the U.S., and if that regulation is tightened then those people will suffer being away from their immediate family or will not come to the U.S. at all. Or, even worse, they might be tempted to bring those close relatives and then stay illegally rather than paving a road for those people to gain citizenship.
c. The prototypical customer would be someone who wants to get U.S. citizenship, and possibly their family.
d. The opportunity would, again, be hard to exploit, because anything to do with government is slow to change (although the proposed changes haven't been made yet, so maybe a lot of protesting could help prevent this problem from even happening).

Someone might not have seen this opportunity if they feel threatened by immigrants or are racist and want less people of color in the U.S.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/05/climate/trump-environment-rules-reversed.html

4.) My fourth and final problem (opportunity) is the recent slashes in environmental protection/regulation, also perpetrated by the Trump administration.
a. I found this source in the New York Times, but my source of opportunity belief came from the many articles I've read about the Trump administration's attempts to deregulate environmental protections. As a sustainability major, I hear about these deregulation in my classes on a regular basis.
b. I was led to believe this opportunity exists because the Trump administration announced their intent to first deregulate the coal industry (during the election he used this to gain votes), then reversed Obama's decision regarding the pipeline, and now has already overturned as of January 31, 2018, 33 environmental regulations, 24 rollbacks are in progress, and 10 are being planned. This means that we may need to develop technology to compensate for the government's lack of protection of our environment.
c. The prototypical customer would be anyone who cares about the environment, air quality, water quality, clean energy, and the future of our planet.
d. The opportunity is relatively hard to exploit, but maybe easier than the other opportunities in this assignment. It gives plenty of opportunities to invent new technology to protect wildlife (like bears and wolves) whose protection from hunting is being removed, find a way to make coal-dumping less environmentally damaging, and prevent more oil spills because of deregulated offshore drilling.

Someone might not have seen this opportunity if they didn't think there was anything we can do about trying to protect the environment.