Exciting Meeting and Shadowing Ronnie from Jersey Shore

Today I attended a brief meeting in the morning with my sponsor on POP's for upcoming products. This meeting was especially exciting because the meeting was based off of the research I had done a few weeks ago. The first week of project I went to retailers (Walmart, Best Buy, Home Depot, etc) that sell Hoover products and took pictures of competing brand's POPs (Point of Purchase, the decals on the product that make claims) Brian had told me what a good job I had done on this project, but the real gratification came today during the meeting. The meeting was with a few high-up people in the finance, sales, and creative departments. Brian and his creative team used the book of POPs I compiled as leverage for Hoover spending more on POP creation and production. I know that the work I am doing for the company is very menial in difficulty but it felt really cool to see the affect of my report.

For the rest of the day I shadowed, Gino, the product manager of the wet division(carpet washers, carpet washing solutions, steam mops, and air purification systems). He is a very nice guy that is very good at his job and also happens to look like he walked straight off the set of Jersey Shore. He's very tan, extremely muscular, and super Italian. But regardless of him looking identical to Ronnie, we had a good day. He started off by taking me down to the plannagram room and showing me the different SKUs he manages in each of their big accounts (Walmart, Target, Best Buy, etc). He told me about the products, their features, how well they're selling compared to competition, and his role in managing and promoting them. We then went to two meetings. The first was just a logistical meeting with the creative director and the creative director's traffic controller. The system that was in place for people to request art work and images from the creative department was not efficient or effective so they just hired a traffic controller whose job is to develop a better system. The meeting I sat in on was to lay out what jobs Gino currently needed the creative team to complete for him. The creative team was going to use this to update the totally bogged down system. The next meeting I went to was with an engineer. Gino and him were discussing products that one of their Canadian retailers wanted to remanufacture and resell. For this to happen, Hoover has to issue reman boxes with different artwork and sometimes different manuals that encompass several similar SKUs. They were discussing which SKUs it would be profitable to execute a reman for and which to deny from the retailer.