Week 5: On and On We Go

Why did the cookie monster apply for a marketing job? He heard they were tracking cookies.

Love the food-related ones.

This is going to be a very short update, because it’s spring break and you shouldn’t have to read through my walls of text and also because I haven’t really done anything recently (or, at least, not anything special). 

How have you been, Maya?

Well, thank you for asking! A lot of college decisions came out this week so I’ve been suffering for a variety of reasons.

Anyway, interviews have been going just fine and I’m currently up to 18 in total. I’m going to get to 20 by next week, and then I’ll stop that part and begin analyzing the data in earnest.

The bullet point notes that I write after each interview have been progressively getting longer and longer. The first one I ever wrote (business name not included) looked like this:

-only WOM advertising

-don’t want a large business, just enough quality clients to charge a good rate and do quality work

-offering discounts/advertising only brings in people who want the one time low rate and doesn’t yield repeat business

-they’re in a residential home (on a plot that also has a home near it) and if they advertised people would get the mistaken idea that its in a garage or something unprofessional like that

Now, my notes look more like this:

-sell children’s books, toys, etc.

-don’t really spend money on marketing. most of the money spent goes to events (that they host to fulfill their goal of bringing literature to the community, not really for marketing purposes, they don’t even promote themselves during the events). other than that, they spend money on upkeep for eventbrite, website and social media platforms

-in terms of social media, mostly Instagram because it’s easy (15-person biz, people wear many hats, they need to be able to manage it and they’re comfortable with IG). used to use Facebook but don’t anymore

-a lot of their marketing is thru their weekly newsletter (7000 subscribed, 6000 active, 3000 regularly open and read emails) and their book fairs are huge (standard for other book fairs hosted by schools around)

-most people come to the business bc it’s been such a stable fixture in the community (been around since the late 1900s)

-aren’t really looking to grow the business necessarily

-primary marketing challenge: manpower. they need someone to manage the instagram and they’re slowly working on updating the very old website (don’t have funds to hire someone to do it) so that’s all v time consuming and labor intensive

-resource: some way to know exactly what certain actions will cost (ex. updating their website. how much exactly? are there tiers of website updates that cost different amounts? stuff like that)

Anything else?

Nope. Still reading literature on occasion, still thinking about possibilities for my end product. (I’m currently trying to identify good prototyping software for it. That’s all I’ll say, though.)

Have a good me-free spring break, everyone!

~Maya