Saturday, January 24, 2004

The Apprentice: They reran this week's episode of The Apprentice tonight. Still the best (well, the only) reality show I've ever sat through.

The challenge in this episode was supposed to be about Negotiation. Trump's book, as you may recall, is called The Art of the Deal. He pointed how much he saved on his private jet, because he knew how to negotiate and where to buy.

He then sent each team out to save as much money as they could on ten items, through shrewd negotiation.

However, it ended up pretty much turning into a bargain hunting match rather than a lesson in negotiation. Why? Because the secret to negotiation is leverage, and they didn't see any leverage. The men haggled a little, and the women groveled, but there wasn't any real negotiation.

And it only took me about five minutes to spot where their leverage could have come from.

The cameras.

If either team would have walked in to those shops saying, "Hey, we're on this reality show that's being produced for NBC by Donald Trump, and we'll put a shot of you in front of this fine store shaking hands with us, if you'll give us a hundred bucks off this golf club, what do you say?" they'd have had people giving them deals right and left. They'd have gotten things free.

Even if they couldn't guarantee the shot would make it on TV, one of the items was an instamatic camera. They could have said, "Even though I can't control the final edit of the show, I've got a website. And if you let me take a picture and give me a business card, I'll scan them both in to my computer, and at every appearance I do, every interview I do, everywhere I go, I'm going to tell people about this website. And anybody who goes to it is going to see you, and they're going to remember you from on TV and when they need a golf club, they're going to come here, because they saw it on NBC, on Donald Trump's TV show, this is the place to buy golf clubs."

I'd have whooped both of those teams.

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