The Power of Marketing by Ella

The Power of Marketing by Ella - April 2025 Scholarship Essay

I sat with my eyes fixed to the screen, iridescent colors dancing in my pupils. From the screen emerged a gruff chant.
“We ready! We-ee ready!”
Videos of different football teams across the nation flashed across the screen, displaying young men and women with nothing but drive in their minds and passion in their hearts. In that moment, not only did I fall in love with the game of football, but also with the art of marketing. I was enthralled by the ability of a 60 second commercial to fill me with such intense passion and romance for a sport that I had never played.
I soon began to dive into social media marketing, as I enjoyed its potential to reach large and diverse groups. I toyed around with Instagram and TikTok accounts that focused on sport, and delighted myself with each new discovery of what prompted virality. The empirical nature of testing different formats, content, and graphics appealed to my natural love of learning what makes things tick, and as I racked up thousands of followers, I realized the power of these platforms to make an ideological difference in the world.
I plan to use the skills and connections gained by being a marketing major in order to help women in my home country, Kenya.Rural Kenyan families are disproportionately disadvantaged compared to the rest of the country due to the lack of internet and sheer amount of energy spent completing domestic tasks that suburban and urban Kenyans do not have to worry about. While on my grandmother’s farm, I walked along the two mile path from their house to the small stream that supplied all of the house water. It was a tiny foot path with multiple changes in terrain and incline that often required direction changes and shortcuts between trees seemingly at random. My tween aged female cousins easily walked the path while balancing a jug of water on their heads, while I stumbled along behind them holding a small pot. While incredibly impressive, this reflects the incredible burden of labor that rural women are expected to carry: they are required to perform these near superhuman tasks for the household, carry out general domestic tasks such as cooking and childcare, potentially work a job to sustain their families, and complete their education. Sadly, education is by far the lowest ranking priority in the eyes of a Kenyan family. Many Kenyan secondary schools, which already have a shockingly low enrollment rate, have very low percentages of girls attending and graduating their schools. I plan to work alongside foundations that fund development and technology within Kenya and target their efforts to reduce the workload of Kenyan women. In time, after creating my own resources and network, I plan to start my own foundation that accomplishes this work and other goals, such as improving secondary school and college enrollment rates for rural women.