The What’s in the Room Activity is a free team building exercise that helps participants develop creativity, communication, and marketing skills by creating a marketing campaign around an everyday object. It works well as an icebreaker or workshop activity for trainers, teachers, and facilitators.
As a trainer, you do not need to worry about any props or preparation for this activity given its simplicity. Although this activity is simple to organize, participants can become surprisingly creative and have a lot of fun.
Activity Outline:
- Duration: 30–60 minutes
- Group size: 4–6
- Best for: Marketing training, creativity, team building
- Materials needed: Everyday room objects
- Difficulty: Easy
Duration and Cost
- 30 – 60 minutes is the ideal time for this activity, and you can adapt it according to whether you are running a half, full, or two- to three-day training session.
- This is a FREE activity that you can use for your own training.
Category: Sales, Marketing, and Creative Thinking Training
Participants: This activity works best with a minimum of 4 people and ideally no more than 6 people in each group.
Purpose: Each group is going to come up with a marketing plan based on an item that is placed in the room. Each group will work as a team and then present its marketing plan to the other groups.
What’s in the Room Activity Instructions
How do you prepare for the What’s in the Room activity?
As the trainer, you may wish to ensure that you bring some basic items into the workshop.
Choose lightweight items that are easy to carry, such as a pen, a paper cup, a book, and any other basic items you wish to use.
Anything that already exists in the training room can also be used by the groups. The groups can choose anything that is in the room.
Separate the Participants
Start by dividing the participants into groups of between four and six people.
The length of this activity will depend on the number of groups you have, hence why anything from thirty minutes to one hour can be used for this task.
Timing
Now ask the groups to spend 20 minutes choosing an item in the room.
They then have to plan a marketing strategy around promoting and selling that product.
Each group can choose the item they wish to use from the room
Presenting the Marketing Plan
Explain to the participants that this activity is really about coming up with creative, innovative, fun, and interesting ideas and solutions for creating a marketing campaign based on the chosen item.
Given that this is not a real campaign, they can get creative and should just focus on trying to really think outside the box and come up with something that others will not think of. They should not be afraid of looking silly, as this is intended to be a fun activity.
As the training coordinator, you might even want to turn this into a Dumbest Idea First activity (see the problem-solving training activities)
Each group (or selected groups if you have a large number of groups) is then given 5 minutes to explain their marketing plan to everyone else.
You can also include time for a general discussion at the end about the results and to vote on which plan they consider the best.
FAQs
What skills does the What’s in the Room activity develop?
The What’s in the Room activity is great for helping participants gain workplace skills in topics such as creative thinking, teamwork, communication, problem-solving, presentation, and marketing skills. By getting participants to present a marketing campaign, it helps them practice brainstorming, collaborating under time constraints, and communicating their ideas clearly to others.
Can this activity be used for virtual training?
Yes, Absolutely. You can easily adapt this activity for online training by getting participants to choose an item from their home office, or they can use a shared image of an everyday object. Small groups can collaborate in breakout rooms before presenting their marketing campaign to the rest of the participants.
Benefits of this Marketing training game
- The What’s in the Room activity gives the participants a chance to think outside of the box, i.e., to think about how they would market quite basic objects. This task pushes everyone to think creatively.
- This free activity also pushes participants to develop team-building skills by working with others for a common goal.
- At the end of the task, having heard the other groups’ ideas and approaches, this task provides a reflective way of learning as participants match and compare their own ideas against those presented by other groups.
- This is a fun activity that is popular and tends to receive positive feedback when included in the
training .
