During my Integrated Marketing Communication course in the MSc Marketing program at Aarhus University, the class was divided into groups to work on the Ad Venture marketing case competition from the EU. My group was one of the top in the class and was sent on to make 1 of 2 submissions for Aarhus University in the Ad Venture competition. The overall goal of the marketing campaign is to increase employment of people under 25 through the use of EU programs.
My team wanted a marketing strategy that stood out from the crowd and didn’t sound like a usual authority figure ‘get a job’ campaign. Through our research we found that people felt they needed more experience and knew more experience would help. They knew they needed a job and wanted to get a job. It wouldn’t work to tell this to people because they already knew it and the problem still existed. (We were using the MECCAS model.)
We had many brainstorms. Some days it felt like we didn’t make progress but those were necessary foundations to get our ideas out. We used divergent thinking techniques and even used some fun exercises to get our brains in divergent mode. We tried to think of analogies to when someone is in a search for something but my face constant struggle. This brought us to dating and, in fact, one of the people we interviewed spoke about finding a job in the context of dating. My team wanted a supportive and familiar message, so we picked the well known, ‘there a plenty of fish in the sea.’ Applied to the marketing campaign, ‘there are plenty of fish in the sea, the EU will help you get hooked.’ Now our campaign felt more like a friend than an authority figure and could be utilized in social media sharing.
Below is our submission to the Ad Venture competition. It will go into deeper detail and provide illustrations of our idea.
seanbolton.me 