Students in Dr. Annette Tower’s Strategic Marketing Management capstone course were tasked with developing a comprehensive marketing strategy to introduce a product or service into a foreign market. When asked to describe the purpose of this project Dr. Tower explained, “With my approval, students pick their own offering as well as the country they would like to enter. This results in a variety of offerings and countries being discussed and marketing plans developed. Through oral presentations of each group’s marketing plan my students gain real-world insights not only from their own project but also from their classmates’ projects.”
One of the teams was able to see part of their strategy carried out in the real world. They decided to base their project on Australian-based wedding dress company “Grace Loves Lace”. After completing research and giving two presentations on their findings, they suggested that the brand expand into Canada and open a showroom in the Toronto market. Just this summer, after the class had concluded, Grace Loves Lace announced plans to open in a new market -Toronto. The students decided to send their project over to the company to let them know they’d had the same finding in the market research they conducted for Dr. Tower’s class. Wade Ziems, Chief Executive Officer of Grace Loves Lace responded enthusiastically, “Good call on Toronto –it is performing really well thus far. All the best with everything in the future and if you found any other great locations for GLL we’d sure like to know!”.
The students that worked on the product launch project were thrilled to receive feedback from the company which supported their findings and proposal. The CEO’s response confirmed that the student team’s strategy was realistic and able to be executed. Student team representative, Elizabeth Roach, a marketing major and 2020 graduate now living in Greenville, SC, spoke about the experience and said her favorite part of the project was the “freedom to get creative with what company we were able to choose. We were able to have ownership of the project and there was so much creativity. Each presentation was different even though it had the same requirements. We had just the right amount of guidance from Dr. Tower. Because there was so much freedom behind the project, we were able to choose a fun industry that we all cared about making the hard work and research easier to do”.
In the end, the class project allowed the students to turn a hypothetical situation into a reality by seeing Grace Loves Lace execute on the Toronto expansion plan. The perfect blend of classroom learning and real-world application.
