marketing skills

Marketing Internship

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Marketing Plan

I worked with a partner to invent a business and develop a marketing plan for it. We received an A on the extensive plan that included promotional items such as brochures and ads. I provided the Executive Summary for it purpose on my website.

Executive Summary

HOLIDAY ESCAPE-Student Travel (HEST) derived from our personal desires for a travel agency specifically geared towards people of our age and demographic similarities. After both traveling and studying abroad extensively, we found a need for a student/budget travel agency for money-conscious people to enjoy the vast resources, education and experiences that traveling has to offer. As a whole, United States citizens are very ethnocentric and many do not find an appeal to travel abroad. With this outlook, it is no wonder our society is ignorant on the global issues we face day to day. We want to help change those views and open up a new world to our youth by providing a service to make traveling easy, fun, educational and affordable.

We start out our marketing plan by providing research on the travel agency industry as a whole. This information provides basic trends within the industry, along with specific information on our target market. Our three main local competitors are then broken down and we describe some of the unique features and benefits we offer. A SWOT analysis of our company is then illustrated based on all this research.

The target market analysis is concentrated mainly on the psychographic target market of college students/youths between the ages of 18-26. We describe their personal and social behaviors through solid examples shown statistically.

The product strategy defines our service as a whole and then breaks down each individual service HEST has to offer, also defining both our product strategy and position. Our pricing strategy is then defined, using a one-price strategy approach.

The HEST promotional strategy section demonstrates our unique fashion in selling our services. We also provide examples in our Appendix of some of our promotional activities.

Next are our distribution strategy, business objectives, and financial data and projections sections. The business objectives and financial data and projections sections posed to be the most challenging because there is very little, if any, information to be found when trying to model around these types of travel agencies. They are privately owned and do not release much information as far as this is concerned. But alas, we did our very best in estimating.

The plan then finishes off with examples of our promotional activities in the Appendix. Some depict our services and some are actual working promotions.

HEST Logo

Persuasive Marketing Campaign

For our persuasive campaign, my group from Persuasion class joined efforts with the UWRF ECO Club to persuade students to recycle their reusable items instead of throwing them away at the end of the year. Together we created the "End-of-the-Year Recycling Campaign,"where students could donate their reusable items for a campus/community garage sale.

Campaign Goals

To decrease the amount of reusable items from going to the landfill
To allocate these items to people in need
To strengthen relations on campus; faculty, staff, administration, students and organizations
To educate the university community on our part in environmental consciousness

Campaign Journal

Thursday 25 January, 2001
I attended the first ECO (Earth Consciousness Organization) Club meeting. The president proposed an idea of an end of the year recycling project - involving recycling reusable items (such as furniture, appliances, lumber, clothing, school supplies, etc.) students might normally throw away in the dumpsites outside the dorms. It was a new project ECO wanted to take on, and I thought our group might be interested in helping to campaign for it.

Wednesday 31 January, 2001
I presented the idea of the recycling project to my persuasion group. They didn't seem completely convinced, but we had no other ideas, so we chose to think about it for a little while longer.

Thursday 1 February, 2001
Adam and I attended the ECO Club meeting tonight to present our campaign idea to the president of ECO, Phyllis Jaworski. She seemed excited to be getting outside help on a campus-wide project that requires a lot of manpower. We set a meeting with the rest of our group for next week.

Friday 2 February, 2001
I contacted the other members of our group about the meeting with Phyllis next week.

Tuesday 6 February, 2001
I called Phyllis to confirm our meeting plans of 7 February at 5:00 p.m.

Wednesday 7 February, 2001
Phyllis met with our group so that we all were on the same line about the project. We thought of ideas about implementing the campaign. We decided for sure to run a survey for on-campus students. This survey would serve two major purposes: first, the get the project known, and second, to get student feedback on the level of potential participation.

Monday 12 February, 2001
I received an e-mail from Phyllis pertaining to a meeting with the heads of Residence Life and Facilities Management. We are to attend this meeting next Tuesday to present our ideas and campaign.

Tuesday 13 February, 2001
I came up with a few questions we could put on our survey. I also talked to my brother-in-law Rusty, who works at a Native American Indian center in the cities for possible donating sites for the recycled items. He was going to check at work how to go about helping us out.

Wednesday 14 February, 2001
We discussed ideas for questions for the survey in our group meeting tonight. We came up with a few to be discussed with Phyllis at the next ECO meeting. We also discussed the meeting next Tuesday with the heads of Residence Life and Facilities Management.

Thursday 15 February, 2001
I discussed the ideas for the survey with Phyllis. She thought it was great! I didn't have any progress about donating items to Native American reservations. Phyllis and I decided to get together early next week to plan an agenda for a meeting with Larry Testa and Paul Stratton, both of Residential Services. This meeting is set to inform the two of our recycling project plans. I e-mailed group members about the meeting.

Sunday 18 February, 2001
Phyllis and I met today to construct the agenda for the meeting with Residential Services this Tuesday.

Tuesday 20 February, 2001
Phyllis and I met with Larry Testa and Paul Stratton to discuss our plans. I have an agenda in the appendix that contains issues discussed at this meeting pertaining to the project/campaign. Also in the appendix is a copy of the rough draft version of the preliminary student interest survey. Larry Testa informed us we had to get our posters/surveys approved by the Residence Hall Board. Since he is the advisor of that committee, he said he'd put us on their agenda next week. Tonight I also made a list of certain tasks (I will bring these tasks up in our group meeting tomorrow) to be split up among group members. I worked on a design for the survey a bit today also.

Wednesday 21 February, 2001
We had a group meeting today before class. We broke up duties. Adam is going to work on poster ideas. Jen is working on prospects to donate the recycled items to. Amber plans to contact the Student Voice about a news release. We also discussed our presentation to the Residence Hall Board.

Monday 26 February, 2001
Today I talked with Larry Testa to confirm that we were on the agenda for the Residence Hall Board meeting this Wednesday.

Tuesday 27 February, 2001
I finished a rough draft of the survey tonight to present at the Residence Hall Board meeting tomorrow.

Wednesday 28 February, 2001
Adam, Summer, and I presented out survey and poster ideas to the Residence Hall Board. Our ideas were passed to distribute both the surveys and posters in the dorms. At our group meeting before class we decided to attend RA/Hall Manager meetings to present the campaign to them - to educate them about what will happen and to get the project known. We split up who would visit each hall.

Monday 5 March, 2001
I talked to Mike Stifter to find out how to go about presenting our campaign to the RAs and hall managers of the residence halls. He gave me the numbers for each hall manager to set up our presentation. All RA/Hall Manager meetings are held each Monday from 8:00-10:00 p.m. I tried to contact the hall managers from the east end of campus, but was unsuccessful.

Wednesday 7 March, 2001
We had a group meeting tonight to go over our progress. I gave the phone numbers for the other hall managers to Summer so she could contact them about the RA/Hall Manager meetings.

Thursday 8 March, 2001
At the ECO meeting tonight I helped write a letter to campus organizations, asking them to help support the project, as it will take much manpower.

Sunday 11 March, 2001
I was finally able to contact two halls for the presentations to RA/Hall Manager meetings. I contacted an RA from McMillan and the hall manager from Crabtree. We will attend those meetings tomorrow.

Monday 12 March, 2001
Jen and I presented our project and ideas to the RAs and hall managers of McMillan and Crabtree tonight. They all seemed very interested in the project and were willing to educate their residents when the time comes.

Wednesday 14 March, 2001
I talked to Larry Testa about how to get the surveys in the inter-campus mail. I got the number of students in each hall from Amy Johnson in Residential Services. At our group meeting tonight we decided to push the survey back to after Spring Break - otherwise we weren't expecting a good turn out if we sent it out the week before.

Thursday 15 March, 2001
I updated the ECO Club with our campaign progress thus far.

Friday 16 March, 2001
I e-mailed the hall managers of the remaining halls regarding presenting our campaign to in their RA/Hall Manager meetings.

Sunday 25 March, 2001
I didn't get any responses from the hall managers, so I called each one, and a few were unwilling to allow us due to lack of time during the meetings and other reasons.

Tuesday 27 March, 2001
I talked again with my brother-in-law regarding potential Native American families that might want our donations. He directed me to a woman who was working on finding out for me.

Wednesday 28 March, 2001
Our group met tonight and we updated all our information and discussed what needs to happen next. We brainstormed ideas for the remaining portions of our campaign.

Thursday 29 March, 2001
After the ECO meeting Phyllis and I discussed setting up a meeting with all the heads of Residence Living, Facilities Management, Recycling Board, and all other parties directly involved with this project.

Tuesday 3 April, 2001
I talked to Mike Stifter today about getting the surveys out on campus. I finished the survey completely and brought it to fast copy asking for 330 copies. These copies are to be sent randomly across campus (about 30-40 per hall) - just to get an idea of actual student interest in donating their items. I have a copy of the finalized survey in the appendix. Adam and I met to discuss how the campaign was going.

Wednesday 4 April, 2001
I worked on a letter to the heads of Residence Living, Facilities Management, Recycling Board, etc. about a meeting set for Thursday, 12 April. I also let group members know about this meeting tonight during our meeting before class.

Thursday 5 April, 2001
I turned the surveys into Mike Stifter to be sent out in inter-campus mail. I personally delivered the letters for the 'bigwig' meeting with the heads of Residence Living, Facilities Management, Recycling Board, etc.

Wednesday 11 April, 2001
I prepared a news release and send it to the Student Voice. I also prepared the information needed for the 'bigwig' meeting tomorrow.

Thursday 12 April, 2001
Phyllis and I attended the 'bigwig' meeting today to settle the logistics of the project. Everything seems to be in place as of now.

Tuesday 24 April, 2001
I made ECO fliers for Unity in the Community in efforts to gain more knowledge about the project, club, etc. I have a copy of the flier in the appendix.

Wednesday 25 April, 2001
I sat at the ECO table today and handed out the fliers at Unity in the Community.

Thursday 26 April, 2001
I tallied the final results from the surveys - it was not good. We received seven of the 330 back. Four of the seven were interested in donating items. Three were not.

Wednesday 2 May, 2001
Tonight after class our group met to discuss finalizing the campaign.

Friday 4 May, 2001
Adam dropped off the posters today.

Sunday 6 May, 2001
Summer gave me the copy of the informational letter for the students. The informational letters will be sent to each room of every hall so that all students living on campus will receive notice of the rules and regulations for the project and sale.

Monday 7 May, 2001
I distributed the posters to the halls and sent out the informational letters for the students.

Tuesday 8 May, 2001
Our group met for the last time to finalize our campaign.

Evaluative Essay

The campaign our group chose to work on was the End-of-the-Year Recycling Project with the ECO Club. Our ultimate goal was to persuade the students of UW-River Falls (primarily the students living on-campus) to donate reusable furniture, clothing, appliances, school supplies, and other items that are otherwise thrown away in campus dumpsites at the end of the semester to families or organizations in need. Since the actual project will not take place until after this campaign paper is due, the means in which we chose to determine the campaign's effectiveness is the results of a campus-wide survey. The survey results will be discussed later on in this paper.

From the beginning of the campaign, there was not much interest in the recycling project from the rest of the group. I came up with the idea after attending an ECO (Earth Consciousness Organization) meeting, and when we discussed it as a group there were no other ideas, so we settled on this one. As far as our weaknesses are concerned (and there are quite a few, as I will outline), I believe this was the strongest weakness that influenced how the entire campaign was implemented.

It started out fine, even if we were not all convinced this campaign was the right one to pursue, but as lack of interest towards the project set in, eventually so did lack of participation. Everyone was quick to volunteer for certain tasks in the beginning, but the tasks were not followed through with most of the time. The lack of interest then, created a domino effect: first there was lack of interest, then lack of participation, hence - nothing was happening.

The lack of interest and participation were not the only weaknesses in our campaign - those are what I believe to be our internal group weaknesses. There were external weaknesses involved in the campaign that we really had no control over.
This is the first year the ECO Club has had the will and permission to have the End-of-the-Year Recycling Project. So it is a completely brand new idea for not only the club members, our group as the campaign managers, the campus staff and administration involved, but it is new to our target audience - the students living on campus. Presenting a new idea and making it known and accepted is a very hard task to take on. I think we as a group did not realize this when we first started the campaign. It is very difficult to work with a project where there is little or no background knowledge of it. Then to conduct a campaign for a group with little manpower and motivation just adds to its almost inevitable unsuccessfulness.

Another external weakness our campaign had was the fact that there were so many hoops to jump through in order to get permission for this and that, and along with this tedious process is the delay in time. The main reason there were these hoops is because again, this is a new campus-wide project. It involves a lot of people. The downfall here, though, is the time it took to get things passed in order for us to maintain our campaign. If this project were not new to the campus, things probably would have gone more swiftly in this area.

Finally, the fact that the project was scheduled for the end of the year, during finals week was probably a huge turnoff for students. It is a very stressful time of year and this is probably the last thing people have on their minds. Not only does the time of the project affect our audience's perspectives, it effected how our group handled the campaign. It seemed so far away that our group did not do much in the meantime to prepare the audience for the project. The time of it also affects how our group is able to objectively evaluate the campaign, when the project did not even happen yet. I think that our mentality - set on our weaknesses so greatly - also affected the campaign as a whole.

In a completely different way, this campaign had strengths for me personally. The weaknesses I found are going to happen in all campaigns, for the most part anyway, it is just a matter of seeing these obstacles beforehand and trying to fix them before they hinder the entire campaign's purpose. We certainly did learn from these weaknesses.

If we had done things differently, I think everyone in the group would agree it would have been easier to piggyback with an already steady-standing campaign (such as the Blood Drive, for example) and that we should have done something like that. But personally, I think we learned a lot more through our shortcomings than what we would have learned in conducting a smooth-running campaign.

Since we really will not entirely know how effective our campaign efforts were until after the project is done, I want to share what I think will happen. I believe that the project may start out slow, but as students watch others participating, they will come to know it as the 'right way to do things.' It will become a set rule in moving out. I think in order for this to happen, though, it will take time. After time and much more manpower and motivation, I believe this project and campaign could be a true success.