Branded in Blacksburg

…Just a quick note. Since this blog is for class grades, I wanted to make sure that it was known that two classes’ blog posts are populating this blog. Advertising posts & Healthy Kids Campaign posts are mixed together into one continuous blog roll dating back to September of this year. I don’t want to confuse anyone, but I realize it may be difficult to distinguish which posts are for which class. The posts are tagged accordingly (advertising for that class, healthykidscampaign for the HKC, and both tags if the post applies to both). If you’ve got any questions, feel free to ask a question here on Tumblr, or email me at mrossp24@vt.edu. Sorry if this caused any confusion…that definitely wasn’t the intention! My desire was just to have a blog that was nicely and densely populated…something I could potentially show employers down the road that would help set me apart from my competition.

To those reading, thanks for an awesome semester and I look forward to seeing you soon!!

-Ross

Finally… the last journal…

It finally happened. Today Yasmin and I had our final meeting with Melanie. We presented her our survey questions, which she liked, and agreed to get back to her with some edits from the great and almighty Lauren Prociv. Melanie also asked us to keep updating the Facebook regularly until the end of semester. 

It was a bittersweet moment because I’ve put so much time and effort into this project…dating all the way back to May of this summer before I knew I’d be working as an intern during the fall semester. It was so frustrating, however, that Yasmin and I weren’t able to do more or really put our ideas and initiatives to the test. We read Wansink’s book and really wanted to put some of the information we learned - such as setting good examples for your children & keeping portion sizes reasonable (from the chapter called “Nutritional Gatekeepers”) into some sort of campaign format. 

Either way, I learned a lot through this experience. Though it wasn’t really a positive one, I gained valuable knowledge regarding how to work with difficult clients and how to stay positive even when things look as bad as they can possibly look. I hope i’ll be able to apply what I learned throughout this whole process and experience to a real situation one day and be able to say, “hey…interning for Melanie and the HKC wasn’t too much of a lost cause as I thought.” I wish Melanie the best of luck in her future and hope her organization can find all the success she desires. It’s been a great semester and I hope this spring is just as exciting!

Another shorter journal entry about a day in the life of a Healthy Kids Campaign intern…

Melanie apologized today for her lack of tact when informing us about our new roles as interns. It was appreciated, though I’m still disappointed this experience hasn’t turned out to be a positive one. 

With that said, Melanie today asked us to create a survey that will be delivered to her community partners. Also, the steering committee has officially changed the name of the organization to Healthy Kids NRV. It’s kind of a shame that Melanie is letting them take over as much as they have when it is her organization at heart. 

Melanie also announced today that our last meeting will be next week before we leave for Thanksgiving break. It’s a relief and yet still bittersweet. I wish this whole process had played out differently but that’s some of the life-lesson experience i’m gaining from this internship.

We also finished the Mindless Eating book. The last couple of chapters were really interesting and dealt with how we can really eat better and limit our fattening food intake. In the “Fast Food Fever” chapter, Wansink talked about how it’d be more healthy for those kinds of restaurants to limit the grease used in fryers and to provide more substitutes for the fattening foods, like vegetables and fruits. Most people would rather eat the fat stuff though, and that’s why those options are still so readily available. Creating a marketing campaign using all the cool facts and figures from this book would be so awesome and interesting. You could make it fun, educational and funny all at the same time. I wish we could apply what we’ve been learning to our real life setting and internship…maybe next time.

At this point in the game, we’re at the end of October and about to start the craziness that is November. Yasmin and I have still yet to produce anything of value for Melanie or the HKC. We really started asking Melanie what she wanted out of us and how she wanted us to use our abilities and knowledge to help her situation.We continued to offer suggestions of community outreach and better social media habits, but every time we were shot down due to the website’s inactivity. Melanie then decided that she felt we weren’t being guided enough, so she sent Yasmin and me an email that basically said our opinions were invalid and that the steering committee would be guiding Melanie from this point forward. It was a blow and I was outraged. All the time and effort I’d been putting into this project and class and now it’s all for nothing. 

Melanie instructed us to create biographies for her community partners. Yasmin and I dutifully completed that task. We also looked back on our summer project and tried to draw up some ideas for Melanie to use, even though our feedback and opinions weren’t necessarily warranted. I looked at Chapter 4 of Wansink’s book, “The Hidden Persuaders Around Us,” and thought that it’d be really cool to create a marketing campaign that identifies all the pesky persuaders around us that can cause us to overeat. It would be even cooler if the HKC was able to start this kind of campaign up because it’s great promo for the organization while still bringing goodwill to the community and carrying out Melanie’s mission statement. 

Once again, sadly, we were denied any ability to make an impact. Melanie asked us to create a new marketing plan that disregarded everything we suggested and laid out in the plan from earlier in the year. At this point in the semester, we’ve read a book, updated a Facebook page with no more followers than when we started, and produced a few creative items that haven’t been used. Melanie’s biggest problem is she doesn’t see the big picture. She asks us to update Facebook, but that’s pointless if no one is checking it and there are no new followers or likes. We have to advertise and market to bring those people out. Yasmin and I so desperately want to do that and try to do something of value, but it’s so difficult when we’re being shut out every time.

Journal #5 - 

So we’re over 6 weeks into our internship with the HKC and we’re starting to be a little more aggressive with Melanie. We want to help her and the fact remains that we’re only here for another month and a half or so. Personally, I’m not exactly clear on what Melanie wants done. I don’t know what the purpose of her organization is. We were told this week that the steering committee wants to change the organization name (replacing campaign with network) and that they don’t like the usage of 5-2-1-0 in the logo (or prominently in the organization, for that matter). What a blow. After all the feedback and work put into Melanie’s logo and business card, it’s all been for nothing. It’s going to be changed. What makes matters even worse is that the committee wants to change the organization name. Do they not realize how detrimental that could be? People are already associated with the “campaign” aspect and by changing the name, you could lose people and just confuse the public. It’s hard enough for a full-blown and respected corporation to change its name let alone an extremely small non-profit. 

I’ve started to ask Melanie what the real goals and objectives are for the HKC, and what the ultimate endgame is: to change policy, change lives, outreach, etc. She keeps referring back to the mission statement, but even then - you have to have some sort of tactics or marketing to better children’s lives. Just by simply existing and being a “network” doesn’t mean things change. A network still has to be active and involved! If not, then how do people know the network even exists? Melanie and I aren’t seeing eye to eye on that question and next time I’m going to have to figure out how to better ask it.

Meanwhile, we’re still doing research. Melanie wants us to contact her community partners and ask if they are still interested in being a part of Melanie’s contact list. I don’t feel comfortable with that task and neither does Yasmin. I told Melanie that and she understood but seemed hesitant and slightly irritable. I hope she understands…

Our book is getting better too…Wansink keeps talking about ways to prevent ourselves from overeating. One example he gave is to not read restaurant menu’s descriptions of meals because they’re so enticing and mouth-watering awesome. That just makes our eyes bigger than our stomach and can cause major overeating. This book has so far been the perfect fit for this class.

Another journal entry for my time spent at the HKC:

It’s October now, and Melanie is away in New Zealand anxiously awaiting the birth of her grandson! Congrats, Melanie!

Things are starting to get a little rough for Yasmin and me…we’re not really doing anything productive for the HKC. Rather, we’re just given small tasks that don’t really amount to anything. I know you could say that our work is being used elsewhere or in some other manner, but…that’s just not true in this case. All our research and interesting findings, the brochure & flyer Yasmin and I created - it’s all just kind of going to waste in a big pile in Melanie’s office. 

Yes, we started creating some awesome promotional materials for Melanie. But she just kind of tossed it aside and said she doesn’t want to use any of it until the website is finished and built. I don’t want to argue with her, but it’s hard for us to sit idly by and wait for her to give us something productive to do! We really want - and are urging her - to go out into the community and try to partner up with some local businesses like Macado’s and the Farmer’s Market. We suggested doing a kid’s night at Macado’s or sponsoring a certain healthy food or snack at the Farmer’s Market one weekend. We even talked to Melanie about her going to a town council meeting and just trying to raise awareness of her organization. Unfortunately, she wants no part in this. 

I have been reading the book, though. It’s getting more interesting. Wansink has so many interesting facts in his book. For example, he was a main player in making the really popular “100 calorie” snacks. He was also instrumental in creating taller glasses for bars to use, which lessens the amount of actual soda or sugary drink being consumed by the customer. It’s this kind of creative genius that I want to utilize and put toward the HKC! If only we weren’t being stifled creatively…

Here’s a journal entry about the 2nd and 3rd weeks with the HKC.

So it’s been a couple weeks in our internship and so far things are moving a little slower than I anticipated. Melanie has us doing various research tasks, like finding out about school diets and various “nuggets” of information relating to childhood obesity in the New River Valley. Yasmin and I are trying to, however, get some kind of marketing speak into our weekly discussions with Melanie so we can try and provide some kind of useful information. 

We really want to use the 5210 Plan (pictured above) that is so popular among most anti-childhood obesity networks and campaigns. Basically, it means 5 servings of fruits & veggies, 2 hours or less of screen time, 1 hour of exercise, and 0 sugary drinks every day. It’s a great campaign that’s already established which would be awesome for Melanie to just piggyback on in order to raise some awareness for her own campaign. We’ve started to really question, thought, the objectives and goals Melanie has because she is so indecisive in her thoughts and what she really wants to do.

So, we continue to update the Facebook page and complete the research she asks of us. She also wants us to come up with some kind of brochure layout that she can plug information into and send off to her community network partners. Problem is, I’m not really sure how to layout a newsletter…

In other news, our textbook for the class came in and it seems like an interesting read. Mindless Eating, by Brian Wansink is all about food psychology and what motivates us to mindlessly eat and continuously over-indulge ourselves. It should be a good read and I’m anxious to see how it will be able to play into our time with the Healthy Kids Campaign.

My time spent working with the Healthy Kids Campaign can be summed up by dividing the weeks of the semester. So, the next few posts will be reviewing just what I did for the organization based on the various weeks.

The internship started in August. For the first couple weeks I worked diligently on making sure Melanie’s business cards were perfectly designed and ready to be sent to the printing press. It entailed everything from making sure the font size was large enough and also creative yet readable; it included making sure the logo for the HKC wasn’t too overpowering, but still colorful enough to make a splash; most importantly: making sure Melanie was happy with the final product. I started learning at this point how picky and particular Melanie is and I made a mental note to make sure I’m always ready for her blunt and extremely particular feedback.

I also was introduced to the infamous steering committee during the first couple weeks of the internship. Little did I know that that road was just a one-way ride to disaster (more on that later). I attended the first steering committee meeting where members discussed the ongoing website construction and ways the HKC could branch out into the community and perhaps partner with various speakers around the community in order to build some awareness. At this point in time, I hadn’t really flexed my own opinion muscle, but rather - I was seeing the state of the organization before I made any comments.

Bryan Wansink’s book Mindless Eating was definitely an interesting read. It tied beautifully to my work this semester with the Healthy Kids Campaign. The book reinforced the idea of when to stop eating and why we keep eating even when our bodies tell us we’re full and don’t need anymore food or nourishment.

The book was especially helpful because I was able to take Wansink’s evidence he collected during his research and present it to Melanie - my boss - which was useful in developing various creative deliverables, such as flyers and brochures. The book’s information was a way to show the importance of linking both scientific research and marketing and advertising. Without that hardcore data and evidence, you can never really know if what you’re doing marketing-wise is going to catch and stick with your consumer base.

It was also important to note from Mindless Eating various ideas that we could use in our creative. For example, one big idea from Wansink is that portion control is key in making sure an individual doesn’t overeat. We had some creative ideas about making advertisements that were geared towards parents and children about overeating and making sure parents really watched what was going in their children’s mouths. If we could market that idea of controlling the amount of food being ingested by children, then parents might look back to the Healthy Kids Campaign and remember that we were the one broadcasting that important message.

That was just one of the many ways we used Wansink’s Mindless Eating book to influence my time with the HKC.