The 'Challenge' of Marketing

At the end of this school year our Direct & Integrated Marketing teacher told us about an annual competition hosted by DMEF the Direct Educational Foundation.

They work to attract, educate and place college students in direct/interactive marketing careers, thereby expanding and enriching pool of trained, market-ready marketers. 

The DMEF brings direct/interactive marketing instruction to the college campus, while helping students learn about marketing career opportunities. The DMEF publishes teaching resources, career information and the academic research publication, Journal of Interactive Marketing®. 

The DMEF Collegiate ECHO Direct/Interactive Marketing Challenge was started in 1986 in the name of Leonard J. Raymond, the 'founding father' of direct marketing agencies. Over the years they have had clients sponsors such as Ford Motor Company, American Express, Hallmark Cards, Microsoft and Mazda just to name a few.

This year our client was dELiA*s Inc. an American retail store focused on direct and traditional marketing. The point of the competition was to create a campaign that focused on dELiA*s' objectives for 2013-2014...

1) Target potential new customers and drive them to our web or store channels and entice them to make a first purchase.

2) Target existing customers and entice them through various marketing methods to buy more.

The campaign required a written proposal including:

• an executive summary
• market research
• marketing strategy
• media plan
• creative strategy
• budget
• visual summary (of your proposal)
• appendices (creative samples, campaign forecast results, consumer video advertisement & a strategic summary chart)

All of this within a 10-page double spaced report (excluding title page, Strategic Summary Chart, bibliography/references and appendices.)

Our strategy was to have roughly 1-1 1/2 pages per section, See our full report here...


Our campaign is called 'Snip to be Cool' and to sum it up, consumers receive or download a cut-out 'model' and use pictures (from online or catalogue) to dress their model. They glue her onto a contest entry form, fill it out and either mail it to their local dELiA*s or upload a picture online. Twice a week a draw for prizes will be held and judges will pick one winner per select store (1-2 stores per state.) Prizes include free items, discounts and coupons or exclusive new items not advertised yet.



Check out our Creative Samples (advertising and promotional posters) on my Facebook Page, or our Television Commercial and Campaign Visual Summary on Youtube!

The hardest part of competing in this challenge was time management.

I worked with one other partner (and our teacher could be our 'Faculty Advisor' only.) Not only did she work full-time and couldn't start any work until 5:30pm every night while I worked from 9am-12pm every day, but we were only 3 weeks to complete our entire campaign while other teams had been notified of hte competition when at the beginning of the year!

While the three of us did collaborate on the research, campaign concept and creative ideas... I ended up completing all of the creative samples, half of the company research along with writing the entire report and developing both videos.
My partner focused on the other half of company & competitor research, our budget, consumer data (research) along with our strategic summary chart.

I was also in charge of spelling/grammar check for all our work, editing my partner's work, fixing any revisions our teacher suggested along with keeping track of our bibliography/references.

For any group of 4 students this wouldn't seem so daunting, but for 2 people when one is 50% more available to work than the other it is 3 weeks of hell. And WHY would I put myself through all of this trouble?

• 1st prize is $2000 to be split between the partners, a gold place trophy & $5000 to be given to the school's marketing department to be added to their award/bursary funds.
• 2nd prize is $1000 to be split between partners, a silver place trophy & $2,500 for the school's award/bursary funds.
• 3rd prize is $500 to be split between partners, a bronze place trophy & $1000 for the school's award/bursary funds.
• Not to forget the Honourable Mentions for...
  - Most Innovative Marketing Strategy
  - Best Media Plan
  - Creative Execution
  - Smartest Budgeting Approach
  - Best Market Research

My advice for anyone who wants to compete in this campaign next year would be to START NOW so that you have time to properly allocate tasks, workloads and give yourself enough time to think of a good strategy. Our team started our 50/50 and with time running our and my partner more concerned about research and fully understanding the consumers I had to take initiative completing the report and creative so that we wouldn't run out of time.

Another piece of advice I would give is to keep at LEAST one of your school textbooks, even if it is the one you paid for and didn't use at all... *ahem* It has proven to be the most useful outside of school giving us the examples and definitions we needed to complete this competition with our heads held high.

Also, even through splitting $2000 seems nice with only two people, I would have LOVED a 'third wheel.' The work would have been divided more fairly and hey, $666 as a reward with a lower stress level would be better than $1000 and a mental breakdown any day...

My last pieces of advice are the most obvious, but the most important (other than taking one class in Accounting couldn't hurt your budgeting skills,) pay attention to your teachers and don't take their wisdom for granted. Take the time to become friends if not 'more than aquaintences' with them. It's because of this 'acquaintship' with my teacher that compelled her to tell me about the competition and help me. She knew how high my professional standards are and that I would work hard to try to win Canada (and our school) that first place trophy.