September 2009
Getting Busy Building Buzz
Wharton "Principles of Advertising" Course Lets Undergrads Apply Theories to Real Student Start-up Firms
When University of Pennsylvania junior Lisa Schlesinger signed up for Wharton Prof. Patricia Williams' "Principles of Advertising" class, she had never worked for a start-up before. However, a hands-on class project with Wharton Venture Initiation Program (VIP) businesses provided an "eye opening" introduction to the world of entrepreneurship.
Working in 11 teams, the undergraduate students formed mock advertising agencies last spring to create marketing communications campaigns for the student firms of VIP, Wharton's educational incubator. "It wasn't, 'Imagine you are working on X company.' This was for a real company with real consequences. And as much as it was real for us to create the campaigns and discuss strategy, there were other student teams working for our assigned business as well, so it felt like we were competing with other ad agencies like in the real world," says Schlesinger, a psychology major in Penn's College of Arts and Science.
VIP, which is managed by Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs, helps Penn students as they develop their business from idea to implementation. The VIP businesses that served as "clients" for the undergraduate class project ranged from a winery and consulting company to a luxury handbag designer.
Schlesinger's team was assigned to create a strategy to raise awareness and interest in the winery, Sonoma Wine Innovators' Group (S.W.I.G.), which is about three years away from launching. After determining distinguishing factors such as the winery's location in Sonoma, CA and its focus on personalization - customers can take part in any step of the wine-making process they choose - they focused on defining S.W.I.G.'s demographic. For market research, they talked to high-end wine store owners who often serve as gatekeepers to this community.
"We learned a lot about how much of the process consumers want to be part of and how important it is to have luxurious and expensive facilities versus just functional," she recalls. Those interviews also highlighted the challenge of launching this type of business in the current economic environment.
"We created a mock-up Web site and added pictures in line with our findings from our research - we showed luxurious, wide open spaces and tried to show different aspects of the wine- making process. We never used images of people alone because wineries are very social places," she says.
Schlesinger adds that her team also suggested a focus on nontraditional marketing such as wine blogs as well as using "buzz agents" within select social circles that would be offered free charter memberships to the winery-- similar to a country club -- with the understanding that they would serve as ambassadors to bring in additional members.
Recent Wharton MBA graduate Lucas Buchannan, cofounder of S.W.I.G., says he was very surprised at the quality of the undergraduates' analyses and recommendations. "In the real world, I could imagine having paid tens of thousands of dollars for the work they did. We had a gut feel of the likes and dislikes of our potential customers, but they got the hard data and confirmed our target market."
He adds that the teams' ideas regarding specific marketing campaigns provided realistic options. For example, one group proposed sending a group of influencers a bottle of wine with S.W.I.G.'s label and the influencer's actual signature to show how they could personalize the wine bottles.
This wasn't the first time that Prof. Williams provided her students with a real world project for hands-on experience. In the past, her students have worked on marketing communications campaigns for the Honda Fit and pitched marketing campaigns to an executive from Aquafina. But the semester-long project with the VIP students took this type of experiential learning to another level.
Prof. Williams says, "Very often, when students think about marketing communications, they think about it on a grand scale because they see bigger communications efforts from major brands with millions to spend. They see the finished product, but not the process that goes into creating it. I wanted them to see what it is like creating the strategy on a smaller scale with smaller budgets," she adds. "Most of these students will be involved at some point in the process of creating marketing communications strategies whether as brand managers or in other positions so they need to understand the types of questions they need to ask and conquer the process of doing this."
Other student teams in Williams' class worked on VIP alumnus Ben Ashpole's consulting business, Bashpole, Inc., which is launching a software product similar to Opentable.com called MeetPeoplePlaces.com where people can find and book places to hold meetings in venues such as restaurants and cafes in Philadelphia. The undergrads' assignment was to talk to restaurant owners to determine how they reach customers, what communications and advertising they use, and whether this product would help them reach their clients.
The students' findings came as a bit of a surprise to Ashpole, who recently graduated with his Masters in Engineering and Computer Science from Penn. He had originally assumed that owners all run their restaurants as businesses, however the students found that owners actually fall into two distinct groups. The first group indeed focuses on the bottom line, but there is another group that thinks of it more as an art and doesn't want to be associated with words like "marketing" or "bottom line." As a result of this feedback, Ashpole says he will change his brochures and company information to reach the different groups.
Lucas Hannell, who worked on MeetPeoplePlaces.com for the class and graduated spring, 2009 from Wharton with a BSE degree, says that in addition to the market research, his team also provided recommendations about using a nontraditional marketing strategy. "There are a lot of bloggers interested in restaurants and have quite connected communities," he says. "We suggested getting bloggers to use this application and then appeal to restaurant owners with a pre-existing network that provides access to a certain number of people. It would be much less of an abstract benefit to the restaurant."
Ashpole says he was very impressed with the quality of the students' final presentations. Not only did he hear "highly useful" suggestions, but one student team also provided a printed report, slides, and sample handouts that he might modify and actually take to customer prospects.
For the students, Hannell says that the project brought to life what it means to be an entrepreneur. "It's easy when you study business in theory to think about things in a very rational way, but when you are a startup, you have to work through the network available to you and there are a lot of conversations, dead ends, and unexpected fruitful events."
Wharton undergrad Christine Cheng, who was assigned to work on VIP business MAVN, a luxury handbag company, agrees. "We got to go behind the scenes with [Wharton MBA student] Eurie [Kim] as she develops her company. We went to her apartment and saw the swatches of leather and examples of finished products as we listened to her ideas. I have never worked with an entrepreneur like that before."
Cheng, who graduated last May, adds, "It was really exciting to work on this project with a real brand that is depending on you and interested in what you have to say. It's not a hypothetical thing you are doing for Nike which will never be used."
Posted September 2009