Cross-platform blog

Week four
At this stage we had the task of positioning our product 'Varytales' in the market. Having agreed a name and logo for the web-based product and artefacts I was tasked with finding a niche in the market for our product as well as identifying which products were likely to be competition. Examples of other products on the market that shared our demographic of appealing to 6 to 7-year-olds included the Grimm fairy tales website as well as Disney's film and interactive DVD enchanted, and DreamWorks serial Shrek. However the educational element of our product provides its niche as long as it can compete with other educational web-based programs that use fairytales in an educational fashion to encourage literacy. The issue we had to come to terms with now is how do we market 'Varytales' so the product can make money through a realistic business model and still be used as an educational tool. Originally we thought we'd sell the distribution rights to a third party like say, the BBC to put on their website however we were advised that it may be more sensible to contact an educational publishing company because schools are unlikely to pay for educational content that they can get free elsewhere. It was therefore clear to us we were more likely to get our product into schools if we used an educational publishing company that dealt centrally with local education authorities, rather than a media company like the BBC whose public service remit means they cannot deal directly with local education authorities in a profiteering or commercial sense.