Professor Bravo's Marketing Management Class Takes On A Huge Project for Friends of The Children3/24/2019 Things have been heating up over the last few weeks in Professor Sandy Bravo’s Marketing Management Class. Students have been presented with a challenge unlike any other they’ve faced in their academic careers -- they must build a marketing campaign from scratch for the non-profit, Friends of Children (https://friendsofchildreninc.org/). The goal: to bring awareness of the plight of children in foster care.  Students who arrived early to class were immediately confused by what they saw. Professor Bravo had placed a single trash bag on the desk of each student. As students trickled in, they became curious what the trash bags had to do with that day’s class. Professor Bravo presented a stunning visualization of just how serious the issue of the foster care system in our country is.
She explained that a trash bag was the one singular thing that remained constant in the life of a foster child. As the child moved from home to home over many years, the trash bag contained all the child’s belongings and was the one constant in their lives. Inspired by the need to help these kids, the Marketing Management students are competing in teams to present campaigns to the client, Jane Lyons, Executive Director of Friends of Children. The winning team’s campaign will be implemented on social media and endeavor to teach the nation about the plight of foster care children
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For Rick O’Connor (MBA ‘87), marketing is all about adding value to the end consumer. Once he discovered marketing could be used to improve the lives of others and affect a positive change in the world, he never looked back. Currently, he is the Chief Marketing Officer at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and part of the team brought in to transform the company and evolve the New England health care market. He has traveled an interesting path to get to where he is today.
Rick was a psychology major at Tufts University, but he had no idea he’d end up in marketing. Before leaving his job as a counselor in the mental health field, he spoke with some family friends and connections about what they were doing as he tried to determine his career interests. He spoke with small business owners, marketers/advertisers, accountants, and more. Through many conversations Rick saw many parallels between his education and work in psychology and the world of marketing. Thus, he decided to forego his PHD in psychology and obtain an MBA at Babson. Then he spent a decade in CPG. Recently, after several years at Aetna and then CVS Health, he was lured to Harvard Pilgrim in 2016. His main goal is to bridge the gap between healthcare and today’s technology. “The healthcare sector wasn’t built on technology. We’re not as flexible and adaptable as companies that were, but that does not change our customers’ expectations” he said. “Our challenge is to create a technology-based customer experience on par with industries like banking. …especially today when everybody does everything from their phones.” Today, he’s part of the team driving the digital strategy to take advantage of emerging technologies like blockchain and CRM systems, while making the experience for end users more simple and effective.  Professor Gary Ottley started his career at Babson College as an MBA student on a Fulbright Scholarship. After graduating from Babson and spending some time working in Marketing Consulting, Professor Ottley came back to Babson to come and teach Brand Management at the MBA level. After about 5 years teaching exclusively MBA classes, he transitioned into teaching some of the core marketing classes at Babson’s undergrad level. Since then, he’s been a staple in Babson’s Marketing Division and uses his passion for teaching to deliver engaging lectures in both the undergraduate and graduate level marketing courses. Professor Ottley loves to spend his free time taking photographs, reading for fun, and hanging at home with his wife and kids.
The Babson Marketing Division has been giving students in all sections the chance to dive into real world issues and projects to be solved with modern marketing tactics. One such example of this has been taking place quietly in Professor Sandy Bravo’s Marketing Management elective for upperclassmen. Marketing Management’s primary focus is in overall marketing strategy and mobilizing that strategy using the most up-to-date marketing tools and practices. Once the skills are built and reinforced, students are then given real world issues to work with. The class encompasses everything from personal branding, to communication/ presentation skills, to client management. This semester, the class is tackling a real world problem that hits pretty close to home -- increasing the number of BABSON WOMEN RUGBY PLAYERS. The coach of the team has quite a tough job to do simply with coaching, and was looking for an innovative and entrepreneurial way to recruit new members into the program for next year. By the end of the semester, groups of marketing students will turn in a turnkey marketing plan and make a presentation to the client, who will determine the “winner.” According to one student, “This is the best project ever!” Stay tuned to see which group wins!  Dr. Krista Hill Cummings joined Babson College in the fall of 2016. Her research focuses on communication between service providers and consumers. More specifically, she has studied how providers should apologize to consumers after a service failure and has argued for the importance of understanding the emotional state of the consumer and responding appropriately. Dr. Hill Cummings has applied this to many different provider relationships including CEO-consumer, front-line employee-consumer, and doctor-patient. She is also interested in the importance of nonverbal behaviors and gender during the communication process. Dr. Hill Cummings teaches several courses at Babson including Marketing Foundations, Consumer Behavior, and Marketing Research. When she isn’t teaching or doing research, she enjoys travelling, watching massive amounts of Netflix, attending plays and comedy shows, and visiting doughnut shops all over the Northeast in search of the perfect doughnut.
Marketing Concentration Spotlight: Jack Dewitt '18 Reflects on his Babson Marketing Journey4/9/2018  For Jack Dewitt, current Babson senior, deciding to concentrate in Marketing at Babson was a pretty easy decision. Though he described himself as someone who had always been into sales, his marketing concentration and expertise were already paying dividends for him long before graduation.
Wachusett Mountain Ski Area Partners with Babson Undergraduate Students to Improve Marketing Efforts3/2/2018  Tom Meyers, Director of Marketing for Wachusett Mountain Ski Area, was looking to expand his outreach to younger patrons. The mountain was hoping to tap into the 18-24 market and he thought the best way to do that would be to reach out to, “one of the leading marketing programs in the state,” Babson College in the Fall of 2017.
Professor Richard Hanna was teaching two classes Marketing Communications and Marketing Research. “I intended to use a real client for marketing communications and was contemplating using a real client for marketing research,” says Professor Hanna. “I knew [Wachusett] would be a great fit for both classes since they wanted to know how they should be allocating their advertising budget and leverage social media (perfect for marketing communications) and wanted to know more about the millennial market with respect for skiing and how they could attract them to a variety of events (perfect fit for research).” What do politicians and products have in common? Both are brands seeking your dollars (and in the case of politicians, your vote, too). The marketing textbooks of the 1980s and 1990s pushed for a customer (or market) orientation heavily relying on marketing research to find out what customers really want in a product and then deliver it. More recently, however, a product orientation has been touted for success, and suggests that creative product development will be embraced by consumers. Dr. Anjali Bal and her co-authors studied these approaches as they apply not only to products, but to politicians as “brands” as well in a recent article entitled “How customer and product orientations shape political brands” in the Journal of Product & Brand Management.
In today’s advertising world, marketers are faced with the challenge of maximizing the effectiveness of television commercials, especially since the birth of the DVR, Netflix, Hulu and other TV tools. Audiences are no longer forced to watch ads in between segments of programming, which is great for viewers but bad for marketers. To combat this problem, advertisers have tried to make commercials more high energy and engaging in order to retain viewership. In fact, over 80% of television ads are classified as high energy. You know these commercials -- the ones that are bright, action-packed and typically upbeat. However, recent findings revealed that all these attempts to capture the audience, may in fact be turning them away. |
