From sailing ships to managing brands – a quick look at my marketing internship

The consensus at my internship is that the marketing department is understaffed. While this is occasionally bemoaned, it’s also something that a lot of people enjoy because it gives them much more opportunity to get exposure to different parts of the business. My project is one which would have been worked on by an associate brand manager if I wasn’t doing it. It’s very robust so I’m not really contributing to other things my team is working on, but I get a lot of input from them on the direction of my project. Quite literally, the “next steps” slide at the end of my final presentation is designed to be picked up by a full-time employee so that (fingers crossed) if I have good recommendations they can run with it and implement them.

There is a clear hierarchy with me at the bottom. Associate brand manager is the role I would be given an offer for. They work alongside senior associate brand managers doing the tactical work for the brand. They report to the brand managers who carry out the strategic plans of the directors.

Without giving away anything too proprietary, my project is about creating a holistic re-activation plan for a brand. The brand itself has been in decline for about 5 years which is about the time the company turned off media spending. There are a multitude of questions to answer like:

What’s the demographic make-up of lost consumers?

Have we lost distribution of the brand and how do we get it back?

Has there been any innovation in the brand’s space and how has it affected the brand?

Is there a seasonality aspect to the brand and if so, how can we lean into it?

Plus many, many more.

All of these parts fit into the whole of creating an effective re-activation plan. There’s also the added aspect of the company not having brands compete against each other but always working together to create the greatest benefit for the organization.

If you’ve ever taken a marketing class, you can probably easily pick a few of the 4 P’s or 3 C’s from the few questions posed above. The marketing classes from Tepper were certainly instrumental in helping me to frame how I would approach these questions. Other classes were just as important in giving me the conviction that you can’t just see data and take it as is, you need to verify and confirm that what you’re seeing makes sense. This has proved to be extremely helpful in having real weight behind recommendations.

The networking opportunities specifically designated by the company are numerous. Geographically, we’re not in a huge city so they make a point to create a very friendly environment where people really do hang out together on the weekends. As far as Tepper alums, I’m pretty much blazing a trail here. As far as I know, there are only two alums in the entire company and they are both in finance.