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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!
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 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.  Family businesses are the epitome of the American Dream. An individual starts a business, watches it grow and thrive, and then hands it down to future generations. However, without succession planning, the conflict and drama can result in losses into the billions of dollars, which is what happened in 2014 to Market Basket, a premier New England family-owned grocery chain. Victoria Crittenden and her colleagues explored this case in a recent article in Industrial Management.
The Market Basket dynasty started when a husband and wife, both Greek immigrants, captured the American dream by opening a neighborhood food store. In 1954 the two Demoulas brothers (second generation) bought the business from their parents. However, when one of the brothers died suddenly, his share of the company was left to his children. The remaining brother took control of the company, but court battles determined that the deceased brother’s heirs would control 51 percent of the business. In 2014, the battle erupted when one heir (who was initially loyal to her uncle) switched sides and helped to oust the family leadership. This decision sparked massive protests and employee strikes resulting in a loss of $10 million dollars per day. This situation is an example of what can happen when family businesses do not have succession planning. The authors of “Family Business: When You Can’t Choose Your Partners” studied family businesses and offer the following recommendations. |
