MBA students helped to develop a marketing plan for Create and Flow (from left): Chris Pulford, Natalie Sykora, Meaghan Felet, owner Marcie Roselle, Sonia Sandal, Toufic Kamali, Clark Wiebe.
Helping local businesses develop marketing plans brought their class material into the real world, students in professor Peter Voyer’s MBA Marketing Management course discovered while partnering with eight enterprises in the growing mindfulness and meditation sector.
“The project involved intense professionalism,” said MBA student Chris Pulford. “It’s one thing learning about a marketing plan in class, but to actually go out and develop it, as well as lay out potential scenarios to a driven local entrepreneur, undoubtedly strengthens the whole process.”
Over the course of the semester, Pulford and his team worked closely with Marcie Roselle of Create and Flow, which offers a wide range of services, including reiki, yoga, mindfulness, expressive and creative arts classes. The team was tasked with developing a comprehensive marketing strategy covering everything from overall growth down to branding.
“It’s projects such as these that make the MBA program a truly unique experience,” said student Arjun Verma. “I feel that the skills developed from this activity are genuinely transferrable to the workplace: time and resource allocation, research and analysis, implementation and evaluation, but most importantly the soft skills developed through communicating with and presenting to a business owner.”
Verma’s group worked with Stephanie John of Aligned N’ Well.
“We completed an industry analysis, company analysis, Google search trends and capped it off with an implementable advertising, publicity, and promotion strategy,” Arjun said.
Each group delivered a comprehensive marketing plan to the respective business owners and capped the project by presenting them to the class and other members of faculty on December 7 and 8.
In addition to Marcie Roselle (Create and Flow) and Stephanie John (Aligned N’ Well), participating business owners included Heather Nodello and Cheryl Bak-Nielsen (Truthful Healings), Ainslee Winter (Revival Through Hands), Kelly White (Heal ’n Sole), Greg Gurniak (Time to Heal), Rick Saruna (Body and Mind Natural Health), and Nikki Sebastian (Breath Pilates and Fitness Studio).
Vladimir Livrinski