Students represent SBS in Marketing Society Star Marketing Student of the Year awards
The Marketing Society Star Marketing Student of the Year awards bring together the best and brightest student marketing talent in Scotland and this year two students from Strathclyde Business School represented the business school and Department of Marketing in the Apprentice Day which is run by the Marketing Society Scotland in collaboration with Edrington UK.
Chloe McGhee, a third year BA Business student and Craig McIntyre, a final year BA Marketing and Human Resource Management student, took part in the Apprentice Day which involved several team tasks as well as individual interviews.
Both students acquitted themselves well and Craig finished in the top three students on the day with follow-up interviews to come which will decide this year’s overall marketing student of the year.
Craig explained, "I was nominated by the marketing department for my involvement with the marketing department over the last four years of my course. Since my first year of university, I have been keen to get involved where I can, and I have consistently been a class representative for the marketing modules. In my fourth year, I contacted a few other individuals in my course and helped form the University of Strathclyde Marketing Society. Since then, the society has grown and has over 120 members. It was from this involvement that the university recognised me as a potential candidate, and I was thrilled to get this opportunity to demonstrate my passion for marketing at the STAR Award Apprentice day.
"The Apprentice Day gave all the participants a good insight into what work life could be like as a marketeer. I found the day very insightful, and it was great to be surrounded by marketing professionals and other passionate marketing students nominated by other Scottish universities. After everyone’s interview with the group of assessors, the main challenge presented to us was to work in teams to create a marketing campaign on how the whiskey brand, “The Famous Grouse”, could target a specific demographic.
"My team of four came up with three main ideas. These focused on getting the product on the gondola ends of certain retailers and putting a sizeable fake grouse on display to attract consumer attention. Secondly, we focused on creating a campaign called “Flight of the Grouse” this was to develop an on-trade promotion of five whisky cocktails around the country so that more people are aware of the different drinks you can have with The Famous Grouse, making shoppers more inclined to try a whisky-based drink. This campaign played with the words of having a “flight” of whisky as well as how “The Grouse” could take “flight” to different on-trade places across the country. Finally, using the five cocktails that were presented in our previous campaign, we created a social media strategy that created a filter on social media to determine “Which Grouse are you?” and this would encourage people to share information about “The Famous Grouse” online if they found the whisky and mixer drink that was suggested to them interesting or funny, for example."
Chloe was nominated by the Marketing Department due to her academic performance over the past three years and her experience undertaking internships at Louis Vuitton and Pandora. She said, "I was delighted to be nominated for this award, and it felt very rewarding for the University to recognise my hard work. On the day, my team pitched an idea to 'Gather with Grouse', which would encourage the younger generation to consume whisky by pushing communications on The Famous Grouse's current cocktail collection. This was a highly beneficial day for both networking with industry professionals as well as other students, and working on presentation skills."
The Star Awards dinner takes place on June 15 in Glasgow and more information is available here: https://www.marketingsociety.com/event/star-awards-2023
Published: 31 March 2023
