News

Marketing students compete, create actionable plans for SC SBDC

June 07, 2012

Professor David Crockett’s Marketing 705 class recently embarked on a semester long project to create a brand-awareness campaign for the South Carolina Small Business Development Centers (SC SBDC). With 17 centers throughout the state, the network of business consulting centers needed to communicate with a wide variety of potential clients in both rural and urban areas.

These Darla Moore School of Business master's students broke into teams to compete to have their marketing campaign selected by the SC SBDC. The students were asked to not only pick a target market, but to also come up with actionable creative plans that could be put to use by the SC SBDC’s marketing department.

According to Professor Crockett the purpose of this project was to expose students to strategic aspects of marketing communications. The students had hands-on experience managing the myriad elements of a marketing mix in order to communicate with relevant audiences. Previous classes had worked with products and brands in his Integrated Marketing Communications class, but this was the first time teams had competed to produce plans for a single client.

Crockett noted, “I saw very different notions of creativity. Teams selected different audiences on which to focus and then they decided what those audiences needed to see and hear. Answering those questions is not nearly as easy as it may seem.”

Reviewing the presentations on the last week of class were SC SBDC State Director Michele Abraham and marketing manager, Janna McMahan. Together with Professor Crockett they selected the winning teams. They are: 

First Place:
	Blair Deckard	Stephanie Farless	Brittany Mitchell
Second Place:
	Jessica Jordan	Morgan McCutchin	Jason Watts
Third Place:
	Matt Gasmovic	Matt Molony

Brittany Mitchell, a member of the winning team commented on their strategy. “To our group the obvious target market was women small business owners,” she said. “The best part of working with the SC SBDC is that they know what they want and what they need and yet they still have the foresight to be open to new ideas.”

The winning marketing communications plan was presented in the form of a creative brief covering budget, demographics, objectives, and strategies for branding, communications, marketing and media. The campaign was based on an emotional appeal entitled, “Meet Sally.” Sally is a relatable small business owner. Busy with a variety of responsibilities from home and children to running her own business, Sally could use the help of the SC SBDC. The winning plan was based on using social media to reach Sally-like female business owners throughout the state. The strategy included videos and marketing through YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest, all social media used heavily by a female market.

Abraham commented on the depth of the creative presented by the class. “A few teams focused on a statewide audience and others got more specific by working on manufacturing, arts-oriented and Hispanic markets. The students showed they understood not only our products, but our clients as well,” she said. “They created some very interesting approaches using all manner of marketing methods from videos to direct mail to online couponing. We definitely saw actionable proposals.”

Janna McMahan
Marketing Manager
SC SBDC
803.777.0440
jmcmahan@sc.edu