Marketing students get a taste for consultancy
L-R: Callum Crawford, Gemma Flynn, Rachel Crooks and Simon Frewin (Epicure)
Mon, 24 Apr 2017 13:40:00 BST
Marketing students tasted what it’s like to be a market research consultant during a live consultancy project with local company ‘Epicure Bar and Kitchen’.
The company’s main objectives for 2017 are to increase; customers, repeat customers and customer spend and the consultancy project aimed to provide some marketing insight from 1st year students to help achieve this. Students worked in groups to investigate target customers, run existing customer feedback surveys, conduct social media analysis, and competitor analysis and explore promotional strategies that would be most effective for Epicure. The groups then presented their findings and recommendations back to Epicure’s owner Simon Frewin, who also decided on the best project.
Simon explained that “We needed to conduct market research to see what people really thought of us, we found it difficult to obtain this information ourselves, so it was really helpful receiving the feedback and results we got from the students work.”
The consultancy project works with local companies like Epicure, who may not have the size or budget to conduct their own market research giving students the opportunity to get to grips with real-life projects that can have an impact for the companies. “It has been an absolute pleasure working with the students. There are some really talented and focussed individuals on the course” says Simon.
Epicure is working with the winning group; students Gemma Flynn, Rachel Crooks, Dominika Biela and Callum Crawford to put their strategies into place. The group said “there's a real satisfaction in producing work that will help Epicure, rather than for a hypothetical company. Its CV material, and being the winning group felt like a much bigger achievement!”
“Simon's feedback was that our suggestions on how to move forward with promotional activities gave us the winning edge. We took this a step further and explained what tools and avenues were available to use, which he said was invaluable to somebody who was still learning about the benefits of Marketing” explained Gemma.
Simon has already started talking to some students about helping to manage Epicure’s social media presence, giving them a great opportunity to boost their CV with live experience.
