MHC students take on local business in brand creation class
By KELLEN TANIGUCHI on April 14, 2021.
ktaniguchi@medicinehatnews.com
Students at Medicine Hat College in the Creating Brand Intelligence course provided marketing support to Fruitful Specialty Shop by creating a brand identity and promotional campaign ideas to help them grow their business.
Emily Wouters did a lot of the design work for the campaign by creating a logo and designing a new-look storefront for the shop. She says it’s important to support local businesses in any way possible and this project allowed them to do so.
“I was born and raised in Medicine Hat and I absolutely love this community and it has such incredible potential,” said the fourth year business student.
“I think we are really known as a community who loves to support our local businesses. Especially during a time like COVID when businesses are struggling to make revenue and to make profit, I think it is an important time to support our local community and help them out with something that could normally cost thousands of dollars.”
Wouters says a brand identity and campaign is important for a company because it tells customers, employees and competitors who the company is and allows people to identify with them.
Jordan Brooks, fourth-year business student, says they also shot a video advertisement for the shop. He believes local businesses can benefit from presentations and ideas from business students.
“It’s entirely possible that businesses around Medicine Hat are struggling with marketing, or advertising or growing their business,” said Brooks. “A great way to tap into some ideas that maybe they wouldn’t have thought of, or ideas they thought they didn’t know how to implement, is to engage with the students at the college and engage with us.”
The students presented their ideas to Fruitful on Monday morning and one of the owners says the students brought forward some good ones.
“They came up with ideas of routes we could take for advertising, they generated social media posts for us, they also gave us questions for surveys we could ask our customers. So, they did a lot of work and there were a lot of great ideas they came up with,” said Rebecca Whenham. “The surveys I could see us doing to get a better understanding of our customers and they also came up with some great ideas on how to improve our storefront to draw in more people.”
Whenham says some students suggested putting tables and chairs outside their store, while some suggested they change the colours on the windows or change the sign.
She adds she is grateful her company was chosen by the college and she could tell the students put in a lot of work.
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