A Proud Product by Devon

A Proud Product by Devon - December 2016 Scholarship Essay

Marketing 120; when I signed up for this class I had no idea what to expect. I am not marketing savvy. I had no experience with marketing, but I did have experience as a consumer and I was hoping I could get by on years of shopping experience. I had no clue!

Picking up my textbook didn’t help my marketing self esteem at all. Flipping through those glossy, high color pages I remember thinking “I’ll be happy with a C, a B would be nice, but I’ll take a C”. As the class progressed, I was very surprised at how interested I became in the subject matter; I truly believe it was because my teacher was great at his job.

One of the reasons I think my teacher was great is because of the way he broke down our final project. He introduced it to us in stages. This allowed us to use each new chapter we experienced in his class as a stepping stone for our final project.

Our final project was to create and market a product. Sounds easy enough right? Wrong! We had to create the product, draw or design the product, get in-depth about what it is: what materials were used to create the product, how the product would perform, and we had to create a strategy to sell the product.

It took me several days of near constant thinking about this project to come up with a product. I wanted something simple; I am no artist and I had to draw this product. To date, my best drawing was a stick man kissing a stick woman. To make matters worse, I already had the product name but had no product. I found my product by complaining about having to paint my nails.

I don’t like painting my nails; why can’t I just put a piece of colored plastic over them or why can’t I just stamp them with a nail polish stamp? Ding Ding Ding! The Doo-Dad! Yes ladies, the Doo-Dad; tired of nail painting? Can’t seem to keep the color on your nails and off your skin? Having a hard time with that left hand? Then use the Doo-Dad!! Just stamp your nail color and you are done.

Hot dog I did it! Now that I had my product I could outline my marketing strategy. I had pages and pages of notes on how to introduce the product, how to revitalize it when it hit product maturity, when to roll it out to new markets, and how to market it to different sectors of the public. I was ready to begin my final project.

But how would I create my final project? I could write it up in a rather boring Word Document as an essay, or I could go all out and create jazzy PowerPoint presentation; boring-jazzy, boring-jazzy. I opted for jazzy.

I started with a simple clip art character. It was a man who looked displeased. In each clip I would have him ask the narrator pointed and somewhat harsh questions. Each slide focused on a single aspect of the project and I put the slides in order of generally accepted marketing practices. I made the slides colorful but not distracting, humorous but educational, and best of all – I automated the entire presentation. All my professor had to do was pop in the disc, grab a Coke and some popcorn, and enjoy the show.

As the presentation took the viewer on my marketing journey it checked off all the requirements as set forth by the instructor. I focused my efforts into meeting the requirements but doing it in a way that didn’t make the viewer feel like they were reading off a checklist. My goal was enjoyable education. My clip art character enjoyed the journey too. I made sure of that by digitally altering his stern frown and changing it to a smile on the last slide of the presentation. If I couldn’t make my professor happy with my project, then by golly I was going to make my clip art character happy!

It must have worked because my professor gave me an A on my final project

Although it took me a lot longer to create my PowerPoint presentation, it is a school accomplishment that I am very proud of, and I truly believe that if I had the chance to do it all over again I wouldn’t change a thing.