Marketing students help local company realize early success

COB Marketing students present recommendations to local company, Venti LLC.

College of Business marketing students making up 13 teams provided more than 2,000 hours for two local businesses.  For Dawson’s Collision, students provided a marketing plan that focused on search engine optimization, the customer experience and social media.

Intelipod™ by Venti LLC is a sensor-based system that helps firefighters and first responders detect the presence of hazardous chemicals in an emergency response situation.  One student-led team provided the company with a marketing plan, which included analyses of the company’s business case and current marketing initiatives.

Edward Hoffmann

“Based on the Venti team’s more than 30 years of government marketing experience, we found the resulting analysis extremely well performed, and all recommendations were extremely pertinent,” said Edward Hoffmann, managing director, Venti, LLC. “This effort also provided some key modifications to our marketing plan that were readily and successfully implemented.”

Venti also received some value-added support in the form of mailing lists, which a couple of student-led teams obtained for free. The lists provided contact information for all fire chiefs in 10 eastern states and the West Coast.

Not to be outdone, another team established a connection between Venti and the firefighting publication, Firehouse. The team landed a ‘Product of the Day’ placement on the publication’s website for Intelipod.  And, editorial coverage eventually followed.

“Overall, the course was extremely well run by Dr. Brian Taillon,” said Hoffmann. “The student teams all conducted very professional course work and delivered presentations that could have played in the C-suite. This project directly provided meaningful/actionable information to Venti.”

“It’s a great success story of the hard work our students are doing for local businesses,” said Dr. Brian Taillon, assistant professor, marketing, College of Business.