Last Thursday, a team of 18 marketing students in identical black t-shirts invaded the grass quad between Luther Bonney Hall and Payson Smith, installing a battalion of three shiny Ford cars between Luther Bonney Hall’s gathering area and a free cookout catered by Aramark. Free, that is, to all that ran the gauntlet, and checked out one of the cars and filled out a short feedback card.
The usual inter-class crowd eyed the goings-on suspiciously from the usual gathering area at the rear entrance of Luther Bonney Hall.
Bill Murphy, a DJ from WHXQ 104.7, or “The Bone,” attempted to rock the crowd from his table.
“Let’s hear some Husky pride!” he hollered. He and some of the nearby students in their black t-shirts, emblazoned with the words “Adjust your Focus,” held up their hands and hooted with delight. Over the crowd’s response, the slick sound of tires passing along Bedford Street was still audible.
Murphy made a perfectly reasonable assumption: that appealing to the school’s sports teams would grant access to his audience’s basic, visceral enthusiasm. Almost any USM student could have predicted the response he got.
That’s exactly why the marketing students were there in the first place: college students are the most unpredictable-and most coveted-demographic in the marketing world. The students were members of Maine Focus Marketing, which is simultaneously a class taught by Jeanne Munger, associate professor of marketing, and a makeshift advertising agency funded by EdVenture Partners, an advertising company working for Ford Motor Company. EdVenture wrote the textbooks for the class.
Munger said she put together the class after EdVenture contacted her last year. The company’s proposal didn’t fit any existing class in the marketing major’s curriculum, so Munger developed her own.
“I designed the class and the faculty had to approve it,” she said. “It’s like a big lab. It ended up being two or three times the work of a normal class.”
Maine Focus Marketing is competing with similar groups on five other New England campuses: the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of New Hampshire (UNH), the University of Connecticut, Castleton State and Providence College.
The class makes a final presentation to EdVenture and JWT executives on May 2. If they win first place in the regional competition, they will win $3000 scholarships. The second-place team will get $1000 scholarships.
In exchange for serious hands-on experience and a small operating budget, the class at each of these campuses acts as a specialized think tank for Ford Motor Company’s marketing efforts. Their ideas will become the property of Ford’s advertisers, and Munger is pleased by the prospect that Ford might roll out USM’s campaign nation-wide.
“We’re the only group they asked for storyboards,” she said.
Despite the cold response Murphy got from the crowd, the students were pleased with the number of people they got to check out their cars: in total, 800 people between two events-one held in Gorham and another the next day in Portland-sat in the cars, according to the group’s Student and Public Relations Co-Coordinator and Senior marketing major, Stephanie Gavett.
Within fairly rigid parameters, the class erected what amounts to a temporary advertising agency from scratch, tasked with developing a single advertising campaign for a single product-in this case, a small, economical car intended for a young, hip consumer.
“The students could think of any kind of campaign,” Munger said. “It just had to be based on research.”
Two weeks into the class, the class presented its preliminary market research and campaign ideas to officials at JWT, the chief advertising company for Ford Motor Company, and EdVenture Partners, which specializes in developing advertising for niche groups. The students’ research found that college students weren’t impressed with the Focus, which had replaced the Escort and was seen as a similarly generic econo-box.
“The students were really forthright in telling [the agencies] that the car wasn’t popular,” Munger said. “A chief executive at JWT said he found that very bold and fresh of them.”
Maine Focus Marketing’s campaign revolved around the “Ugliest car on campus” competition and an advertising campaign that likened the Focus to trucker hats and aviator sunglasses-things that used to be pass? but are now considered hip. They also decked out one of the cars with enough Eastern Mountain Sports gear to make up the difference between the price of the car and similar models from other companies.
The winner of the ugliest car competition, Justin Krainis, a sophomore business major, won a free day’s Focus rental, several gift certificates at local businesses and a pair of tickets to see a Red Sox game.
“These are what I really entered for,” he confided, indicating the Sox tickets.
Munger said there were uglier cars but they hadn’t been road-worthy. She didn’t want to encourage students to drive uninspected and unregistered vehicles onto the USM campus.
Claire Kim, program facilitator at EdVenture Partners, acts as a liaison between the bigwigs at EdVenture Partners and Munger’s students. She met with the students on the second day of class, she said, and after acted as an advisor.
“All I am to them is, like, a bumper,” she said. She made sure the students’ plans stayed within “specific branding guidelines,” like steering clear of unseemly sponsors, like alcohol and tobacco companies (“Ford is known to be conservative in their advertising,” Kim said) and making sure ad copy has all the required legal disclaimers and doesn’t go too far with any hyperbole.
“Every campus is so different,” Kim said. “But the idea is to find that niche idea that’s going to get students to come out and say ‘ooh, I want to do that,’ and meanwhile get them to interact with the car.” She advises the team at UNH as well.
EdVenture has been organizing classes like this “since ‘1990 or 1991,” Kim said. She got her own start with the company after participating in a similar project as a student at the University of Illinois, developing a campaign for the Honda Element, in its first year on the market. Programs like this are seen as prime resume-builders, and students say they feel better prepared to take on the job market with this semester’s work under their belts.
“I’m going to miss them,” Munger said. “I wish I could start a company and hire them!”