It is April, school is over and exams will start soon for me and all the other students here at UBC. In this post, I want to write about my experiences in my marketing course and my feelings about our most interesting project, the marketing mix analysis video.
First of all, I want to say that this course confirmed my previous assumption that my passions and academic strengths are all leading me to a career in marketing. Our last assignment, a demonstration of a marketing mix analysis in video-format, was the most interesting project I have done in business school since I came to UBC as it provided a great channel for research, creativity and profitability-analysis alike.
Only after all the cutting and uploading was done, I began reflecting on what it really taught me. It taught me many things alike:
1) That marketing can provide a unique combination of different disciplines of commerce.
First of all we started with research, tons of research. What does the company, Starbucks, do right now, what could be improved? Did they already try this in the past? Where can we get information? Are we allowed to shoot video in Starbucks?
2) There will be stress. Lots.
Yes, it was a group assignment and yes, group assignments are of the stressful kind. Hobby filmmakers know that every video is basically a puzzle with an infinite amount of pieces that finally comes together. This can be really hard to do if you depend on your team members and something just doesn’t work right from time to time, so the puzzle can not be continued until the problem is solved. We worked it out in the end, but the good old rule of filmmaking proved to be true once again: “Regardless of how long you think it takes, take that amount and multiply it by four”.
3) That’s what I want to do!
In my private life, I always loved to find ways to present hard facts in a visually pleasant and entertaining manner. Earlier in my life, I created video reviews of video games and electronic equipment and I always enjoyed presenting a problem in a simple yet effective way for enhanced understanding. This project showed me how I can turn my lifelong passion into a meaningful real life application.
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Conclusion
Being the creative director of our project, I was responsible for all creative aspects of the video such as concept, storyboards, sound, props and the cutting/editing process. Starting with nothing but researched facts, establishing an idea to solve a problem and then subsequently creating an effective way to visualize it was without doubt the most impressive project experience throughout my career at Sauder up to this point, and influenced me in choosing my future career path.
Thank you Sauder and thank you Tamar for COMM296!
