Read the following extract and answer the questions that follow:

When a Scented Candle Just Won't Do
 

A fragrance called green tea blows through the corridors of Sonesta hotels worldwide courtesy of Air Esscentials, a 10-year-old company in Miami that sells scent-diffusing
systems. Green tea lemongrass, another Air Esscentials creation, is the aroma of choice at Morgans Hotels worldwide. Now, those very same smells are also perfuming the living
rooms and bedrooms of many private residences. Hotels, resorts and casinos, as well as retailers like Victoria's Secret and Thomas Pink, depend on ambient scents to strengthen brand identity — as well as to get customers to linger and spend. Piping in those fragrances has long been the principal business of Air Esscentials, Aroma360, ScentAir and their rivals in what is known as the air care business. But increasingly, these companies are finding a new revenue stream in the home market. (In other words, pull out those plug-ins.). "Our company grew rapidly because when we would put a scent into a Sonesta hotel or a Ritz-Carlton or a Melia resort, guests would go up to the front desk and ask how they could get it," said Spence Levy, president of Air Esscentials.
"The home market has grown 35 percent a year for us every year since we started in 2007."

Drugstores and other retailers are fully stocked with low-cost home fragrances, from room sprays to candles and wall plug-ins. Now, thanks to Air Esscentials and other such firms,
there are options on the higher end: compact yet high-powered diffusers that will infuse scent throughout a room for hours or days at a time. Examples include Aera, a $200 device
the size of a paperback book that its parent company, Prolitec, says can perfume a room of up to 2,000 square feet, with fragrance levels adjustable through an app. Each fragrance
capsule costs $50 and, according to Aera's website, will last about 60 days if it is placed in "a 450-square-foot room, on an average setting running for 24 hours per day."
Jeanette Wolfe, a holistic health educator, is a big fan of such devices and a big believer in the power of scent to increase energy and "drop you into a calm place," as she put it. She
used to rely on old-fashioned methods to perfume her Victorian home in Princeton, N.J.: dried flowers and squares of muslin that were infused with essential oils and placed in the air
vents. "But it wasn't as strong or clear or efficient a scent as I wanted," Ms. Wolfe said. Now each floor of the house has its own fragrance dispersed by an AroMini, one of several
styles of cold-air diffusers for the home made by AromaTech. According to the company, AroMini, a 12-inch-tall cylinder that costs $279, is strong enough to imbue fragrance in a
1,000-square-foot room. The essential oil or aroma oil refills cost $16 to $180, and last about a month.
The home fragrance market is a $6.4 billion business at the retail level, according to a 2016 study by Kline, a market research and consulting firm in Parsippany, N.J. Using data from a
Simmons national consumer survey, the online research company Statista calculated that 73 percent of Americans used room deodorizers and air freshener sprays last year; the figure is
poised to hit 77 percent by 2020.

More than just a way of eliminating odor, home fragrance has lately become a means of self- expression. "It's an element of design, like the colors on the wall or the furniture — it's a way

for people to communicate who they are," said Richard Weening, chief executive of Prolitec, the Milwaukee-based commercial air care company that recently introduced Aera. "I do not
think I've met an individual who doesn't respond to scents," Ms. Wolfe said. Actually, some don't respond well. Consider the people who are allergic to perfumes or just
don't like them. The "fragrance free" movement, which uses the tagline "think before you stink," has tried for years to beat back the use of fragrances in public places, in deference to
the scent-sensitive. Still, there are many who consider lemon-infused air to be a luxury,

maybe even a necessity. "The general principle is: People like places that smell good, and they don't like places that smell bad," said Mr. Weening of Prolitec.
To hear him tell it, the conventional tools deployed for making a place smell good — candles, sprays, wax melts, reed diffusers, and so-called liquid electricals like plug-ins —
leave something to be desired. The scents are heavy, inconsistent and, in his view, maybe just a bit unrefined. "It's that New York taxicab smell," Mr. Weening said. Two years ago,
Dimitri Gailit, the chief executive of AromaTech, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, noticed that his company was fielding calls from clients who wanted their residences to smell
as inviting as their stores. "So we decided to make every one of our products available for home use," he said.
The devices, sold through the company's website and Amazon, include the AromaCube ($30), a battery-operated diffuser meant for a small space like a bathroom; the AromaPod
($129), designed for up to 500 square feet; and the industrial-strength AromaPro ($849), which comes with an HVAC adapter, meaning it can work through a customer's home heating and air-conditioning system. The company's cold air diffusion process breaks down aroma oils and essential oils — the most popular are white tea and thyme, and oriental
garden — and disperses them in the form of dry vapor.
Depending on the device, customers can digitally adjust the intensity of the vapor as well as the hours that it is dispersed. Control of the diffusers via an app is in the planning stages.
"There are people who are buying our machines for aromatherapy," Mr. Gailit said, "and then there are customers who want to create a certain ambience in their home, like when they're
having a party. They may be having a tropical-themed party or a chocolate fondue party, so they'll disperse a fragrance like coconut spice or chocolate." Customers have responded, Mr.
Gailit said: "Since we introduced our consumer line, we have significantly increased our business." Mr. Weening said he had had the same experience since Aera hit the market.
"We're way ahead of where we expected to be with sales," he said. "People are buying multiple machines."
Aroma360's clients are mostly commercial, "but a lot of business owners asked for scents in their home as well," said Meghan McMahon, the company's director of marketing. Residential customers can choose from cold air diffusers that range in price from $149 (for 300 to 800 square feet) to $1,499 (to cover up to 6,000 square feet). ScentAir, too, ventured
into the home fragrance market at the urging of commercial customers. But rather than sell directly to the consumer, ScentAir has made its home fragrance system — which is

essentially a high-end plug-in that costs $130 — available exclusively on the websites of hotel clients like Marriott and Westin. "It's a nice tie-in for us," said Edward Burke, ScentAir's
vice president of customer strategy and communications. "And by offering the home version on the hotels' websites, it helps us be a better partner."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/business/smallbusiness
 

A Structured Development Process (SDP) is a sequence of steps or stages to conceive
design and commercialise a product. Using the case study:
 

3.2.1. Explain how these organisations identified the opportunity and defined their concept for scented candles. (5)
 

3.2.2. Explain the steps they would have undertaken in developing their prototypes for scented candles. (5)
 

3.2.3 Explain how they configured their distribution and marketing activities. (5)

QUESTION FOUR:

The table below consists of data collected for a project:

Activity	Predecessor	Optimistic	Most Likely	Pessimistic
a	-	3	6	8
b	-	2	4	4
c	-	1	2	3
d	a,b	6	7	8
e	c	2	4	6
f	e	6	10	14
g	e	1	2	4
h	d	3	6	9
i	g,h	10	11	12
j	f,g	14	16	20

Questions:

4.1 Using PERT, calculate the time (t) for each activity. (10)
 

4.2 Draw the network diagram (AON) based on the above and identify the critical path. (15)

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

Question 321 Make sense of how these associations distinguished the open door and characterized their idea for scented candles The associations distinguished the chance for scented candles by perceivi... View the full answer