Energy, Creativity, and Hands-on Marketing

Guest Blogger: Rupert Pattison, Nathan M. Bisk College of Business student

The team of 22 students has undertaken this hands-on project with an amazing energy and creativity. I have been surprised again and again with how people came through and delivered tasks, ideas and creative materials.

At the start the project appeared to be a significant challenge as we got to grips with the client brief, the approval process, and decided how we would structure our team, our communication, management and reporting processes.

Dr. Cudmore commented that we were quick to coalesce and produce creative ideas, such as our Clear Choice name and agency logo. He also said that having a team this large was itself a case study in organizational behavior. Organizationally we consisted of four teams reporting to three directors.

The plan took shape during several team meetings over a period of several weeks, where ideas for the campaign were discussed and refined culminating in a formal campaign brief presentation to the client summarizing our campaign concept.

I was also involved looking at correlations in the data collected in the market research survey.

We set about this task using SPSS software and a lot of tape! It was my first foray into data mining, looking for insights based on the 133 surveys we collected before the event, to form a baseline of opinions prior to our campaign

As a member of the IT team, I was involved in setting up our team website, twitter feed, google docs structure and market research survey. Also in creating a loop of short videos to display on a large display monitor.

Once we had the plan approved we set about delivering the plan in detail. We decided on a date for the main campus promotional event. Using Google Docs to create a shared workspace ensured that we did not experience email attachment chaos. Tasks were broken down into team task lists and assigned to team members.

Being a staff member at the university I was assigned a number of tasks relating to booking the facilities for the event. This was again surprisingly easy.

I was assigned the fun task of doing a radio interview with Wes Sumner of WFIT 89.5 FM to talk about the campaign and main event, the Natural Gas Expo. This went well and provided us the opportunity of reaching beyond the campus community in promoting the campaign event to the wider community, one of the key objectives of the client brief.