Marketing students impress industry
This year's students on the Advertising Planning course were given the task of producing a marketing campaign for the Volvo Ocean Race. After three weeks of intensive work it was time for the four groups to present their work, and the jury – with participants from Volvo and the advertising agencies PS Communication and Gothenburg & Co – was impressed by the students' sound work.
In the master's level course, students are taught how to put together a campaign, make target group investigations, do budget work and measure the effectiveness of the campaign. The students take on a project based on real life and work out their marketing strategies and campaigns in small groups.
The Volvo Ocean Race is coming to Gothenburg in 2015 and was seen as a suitable project for that reason. The task was to present a strategy to attract different target groups to the event by a well designed marketing campaign and to stay within the budget. The jury listened to the groups' marketing presentations and then had the task of selecting a winner.
"This has been a lot of fun," said Sven Österberg from Volvo. "I was involved at the beginning of the course when I gave a lecture, and I answered the students’ questions for almost two hours afterwards. The students came up with extremely good questions and showed a huge amount of energy, which has been infectious. We are definitely interested in taking advantage of these students' creative ideas in our future work with the Volvo Ocean Race in Gothenburg 2015."
Professor Lynda Maddox is very proud of the students' work and the fact that they have acquired enough knowledge during the course to construct a marketing campaign from scratch. She sees them all as winners, but the jury still had the difficult task of picking a winner from the four groups.
The winner was Gumboot Communication with the theme, "It's coming home." The jury's reasons were:
"A well structured and creative campaign full of emotions, with an overall fantastic theme including CSR and PR."
The students in Gumboot Communication thought it was an extremely demanding course. During the three weeks, they spent at least twelve hours every day working, even at weekends. But at the same time, it was very rewarding for them and they have realised that it is possible to go the extra mile and dare to believe in your ideas.
Lynda M. Maddox is professor of Marketing and Advertising at the George Washington University, Washington, D.C., and has been a part of the Visiting Professor Programme at the School of Business, Economics and Law's. Her specialist areas, among others, are commercial communication, advertising, consumer behaviour, and market research.
The course in Advertising Planning is included in the master’s programme Marketing and Consumption at the School of Business, Economics and Law.