Every semester, Tim Dugan Birrittella, who teaches marketing courses in the College of Business Administration, continues to be impressed by the hard work, original thinking and presentation skills his students display during the Target case study competition, a key component of the undergraduate Retail Marketing course.
The winning case study presented by Alejandra Guardia (BBA ’12), Eric Lopez (BBA ’12), Anesys Mena and Michael Perez during the recent spring session was no exception.
The assignment was this: how to court Target’s cross-channel shoppers.
Target asked the students to recommend ways the retailer could use cross-channel marketing to bridge customers through various in-store and online purchasing outlets.
The winning presentation included strong ideas for connecting with shoppers, such as in-store signage reminding customers they could also shop at target.com and daily deals delivered via mobile apps for smartphones.
The students then took their presentation one step further, incorporating an analysis showing how much it would cost to test their ideas in 10 stores and then roll them out to the entire company. They also completed a strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats (SWOT) analysis.
Guardia found presenting the team’s case study to the Target judges to be a powerful retail marketing learning experience.
“We approached every aspect of the case study in an innovative, hands-on way,” she said. “We balanced our creative ideas with a pragmatic financial analysis and a timeline for implementation.”
The Target judges clearly liked what they saw.
“This semester’s winning group really impressed us with the level of detail that they put into their project,” said Cody Woods, senior field campus recruiter for Target and competition judge. “They were extremely calm, collected and confident. They had even prepared answers to all the questions we judges asked. I can say with certainty that they were one step ahead of us the whole way!”
Target awarded each winning Florida International University (FIU) student a $500 scholarship.
