"Well guess what, that's life" - words from Drew Boyd as I sit with nervous anticipation during my first capstone class of the Summer. The MS Marketing Capstone project at UC matches its graduate students near the end of their program with organizations that need help developing an aspect of their overall marketing strategy.
This semester I have the privilege to serve as a student-consultant with Mu and Wenqing for The Academic Advisory Council for Signage Research and Education or AACSRE (Pronounced Ash-Rey) for short. What is AACSRE? I asked myself before shortly finding myself on the AACSRE website.
AACSRE is an affiliate that grew out of The Signage Foundation. An application was filed in November of 2015 for AACSRE to become its own 501(c)3. The purpose of AACSRE is, "to provide independent leadership for the development of new knowledge and educational experiences in order to advance the science, technology, art/advertising, and regulation of signage, specifically on-premise signage". (http://www.aacsre.org/).
At the beginning of our initial meeting with Dr. Dixon and Patty the details of our duties as student consultants were a bit abstract. They wanted us to develop a comprehensive marketing plan for AACSRE. What does that mean? We had to dive deeper into our questions to find out what specific items of this comprehensive plan were most important to them.
AACSRE has four buckets of constituents, Academic Institutions (interdisciplinary); Practitioner’s (In-practice Professionals); The Sign Industry (On-premise design Industry, Identification and marketing of Starbucks, suppliers, manufacturer’s, sales teams) and Related Industries (The Users of Signage: Real Estate, Developers, Retail, ECT). Our job is to develop baseline communication's that can relate to each set of constituents and target their specific need.
Our comprehensive marketing plan as a whole will include, strong research (the board of AACSRE will be interested in this), a way to showcase the sustainability of the organization, database development, follow up to the initial press release, developing the personality of the brand, press kit, how to reach constituents, a clearer understanding of the organization.
I am anticipating that this list will grown and shrink and change throughout the remainder of the semester and that's the beauty of marketing work. It's ambiguous, it's nerve-wracking and it's fun.
I am very excited about this project and I can't wait to develop a grassroots, comprehensive marketing plan for AACSRE.
Let the semester begin!
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