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Customer Interaction Solutions
December 2006 - Volume 25 / Number 7

Cultivating Marketing Excellence From The Classroom
To The Lab To The Workplace:

In Focus: Database Marketing, Telemarketing, E-marketing and Integrated Marketing
By Tracey E. Schelmetic, Editorial Director, Customer Inter@ction Solutions


 
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In 2005, only 39 U.S. colleges or universities reported offering a direct marketing program with at least 50 percent of course content spent on areas of direct marketing. None of these schools reported requiring hands-on experience with direct or interactive marketing companies.

In response to this deficiency, The University of Akron College of Business Administration launched the Gary L. and Karen S. Taylor Institute in the fall of 2004. It did so in partnership with Gary Taylor, chairman of the board of Akron-based InfoCision Management Corporation. The Institute’s goal is to fill the current gap of formally educated direct marketing professionals; essentially, to “elevate direct marketing as a profession and to teach these valuable skills to business students.”

Taylor recalled, “I told the university that I was interested in giving back in some way. When they came back to me with this concept, I really liked it.” Taylor is an alumnus of the University of Akron; he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business in 1975 and earned his MBA at the university in 1977. The Taylor Institute (called “The Taylor” on campus) has been funded by gifts from Taylor and his wife Karen.

The Taylor Institute is dedicated to the database marketing areas of direct marketing: telemarketing, e-marketing, interactive television and other types of response marketing. Located on the fifth floor of the refurbished Polsky building, which was formerly a department store, in downtown Akron, Ohio, the Institute is currently comprised of multiple high-tech direct marketing laboratories, seminar rooms and an office suite for Dr. Dale Lewison, director and professor; and Dr. William Hauser, associate director and assistant professor. Upon entering the building, a visitor’s first impression is that he or she has wandered into the recently (and expensively) decorated offices of a high-tech business. The feeling is professional, slick and conducive to team work, with its break and study areas of clustered tables and workstations.

Recently, Nadji Tehrani and I had the pleasure of sitting down with the project director, Dr. Dale Lewison, and the associate director, Dr. Bill Hauser, along with Steve Brubaker, senior vice president of corporate affairs for InfoCision Management Corp.

TS: What need is the Taylor Institute filling that is not being addressed by standard business schools?

DL: I think the need to have a learning environment in which students can experience a real, applied level of projects. In other schools, typically, students learn what to do, and then they may work on some case studies. They may do a little project, or simulation, but as far as really performing the work, they don’t. They know what to do, but they don’t know how to do it. The fact that we have all these applications labs gives them experience in how to get things done.

TS: The kinds of applications you can’t learn from textbooks.

DL: Right.

TS: How many students are currently enrolled?

DL: Right now, we have roughly 600- plus majors who take part or all of the course work of the Institute. The major that is most involved with the Institute is the e-marketing/advertising major. We also have a direct marketing minor and a database marketing minor. Also, the professional selling majors and the majors in marketing management take a lot of the core courses: buyer behavior, multichannel marketing, database marketing, integrated marketing communications and marketing strategy.

TS: Have you had your first graduates yet? When we last visited you, you had not, since the program was quite new.

DL: We do have students who are graduating. We are not having any problems placing these students; in fact, our biggest problem is that we have three or four times the number of people who want the majors than we have actual graduates at this point. It’s a good problem to have, but it’s still a bit of a problem.

TS: Can you tell me more about the real-life campaigns they conduct in your in-house call center? What kinds of programs are they doing and what kinds of results are they getting?

DL: Well, the call center just came online, but there are two campaigns the students are working on right now. Number one is selling football tickets. Number two is fundraising.

TS: They’re doing an assortment of outbound campaigns, and getting good results?

DL: Yes...the clients are very happy.

TS: Can you tell me a little more about your eVenture Program?

DL: We have a business incubator right in the facility. It is five offices, a conference room and a general common area. Students who choose to major in the emarketing/ advertising or minor in direct marketing, together with the fact that they take two or three of the entrepreneur courses (they may even minor in entrepreneurial studies) would develop a business plan, from development through product management. If they are judged to have substantial direct marketing implications in the plan, we determine the project to be satisfactory, and we give them one free year of rent in our business incubator within the Taylor Institute. They can use it as an office, use the equipment and facilities. We’ll help them implement their business plan. After that year, we can take them and move them four blocks down the street to the City of Akron business incubator, which has been totally revamped and is very nice, and they can have another two years to continue incubating their business.

NT: Dr. Lewison, you mention entrepreneurial studies. Can you explain what these are?

DL: First of all, students have to take a general principles course in entrepreneurship, learning what it means to be an entrepreneur. They also have a course in venture finance — how to finance a new business. They have a couple of seminar courses that deal in other specific things. They usually end up taking about three entrepreneurial classes. They have to take venture management, where they must develop a sophisticated business plan for a business. We have a contest every year on the best business plan; they are judged by outside judges. We also have the Fitzgerald Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, which is rated in the top 25 in the country. We have people in that program. What we’re trying to do is merge the two programs for a good one-two punch in new business development.

TS: Approximately what percentage of students’ education is classroom lecture and what percentage is hands-on?

DL: I would have said at one time it would be about 80 percent classroom lectures, now they’re down to 50 percent classroom lectures.

TS: It changes as they progress through the program?

DL: We do lectures for some of the earlier classes. That way, we meet the University’s financial need for being highly productive: a big cash cow to the University. We do a lot of classroom lecture early, since we’re introducing topics. But as we move into the more advanced courses, there are more projects and one-on-one interaction. Finally, at the end, it’s all project-based. We require our students to either intern or do the practicum; many do both. A practicum is one applied experience where the student uses the internal labs of the Taylor Institute. They usually have a client, and they are expected to manage the relationship with that client. They do project management, and they will use our labs to meet with that client. They are expected to make a margin on that; sometimes, they develop good projects, but they are cost-prohibitive, which is not desirable.

The second experience is out of the Taylor in an internship in an outside company. We’re doing more and more of that, because it’s the best way for someone to hire.

TS: These are local businesses that you’re partnering with?

DL: Yes. We have so many people asking: many more requests than we can accommodate. Everyone is so excited about it, but we can’t meet that need yet.

TS: What kinds of positions are graduates looking for, both right after graduation and maybe five years down the road?

DL: It varies, because of all the various venues of direct marketing. There are many possibilities. The major itself is that we’re trying to teach these people to understand the entire direct marketing process, so they understand it from the database/analytic standpoint to market analysis to creative marketing and marketing strategy to relationship and response marketing. We teach them that whole process, and we want them to understand, appreciate and be able to manage the whole process. We want them to be able to get into management right off the bat. Nobody else is training people to do that. Within their companies, then may end up specializing. We’re starting to explore and build relationships across the campus, with everything from graphic design to creative writing to communications, because all those things come into play. It’s line management training. We encourage our students to specialize in minors outside the department.

BH: You asked earlier about the ones who had graduated. Here’s a good example of the kinds of jobs they’re getting. For those of us on the direct marketing side, we’ve always known about marketing analytics, but out there on the other side, they haven’t. Some of our best students are now getting jobs in Fortune 500 companies in marketing analytics, which is the hottest thing in marketing today. Two or three of our students who graduated this spring are in ad agencies now. Right now, the big focus has been in the ad agencies, and on the analytics side.

DL: At one time, we had a straight advertising major. They were being paid substantially less than our sales and marketing students: average starting salary maybe $10,000 or $15,000 less per year. They were competing with communications majors. There are a ton of those, and they’ll work for anything. One of the reasons why we got into this direct marketing/e-marketing/advertising thing was to give them the specialties and extras they need to command better salaries, and they do.

SB: As Bill was saying, they’re getting $20,000 more a year in marketing analytics than advertising majors.

BH: Or regular marketing management.

TS: Analytics probably requires them to have a minor in statistics or quantitative analysis, is that correct?

BH: They have to take quantitative analysis, but one of the things that we’re doing here that’s really unique is, instead of having people sit down behind a computer and run some statistical algorithms and say, “Here it is,” we’re teaching the students that they have to be able to interpret and analyze the data, then present them. It’s no longer enough to say, “Here, Boss, here’s a page of computer printout with your results on it.” It’s a matter of the student saying, “I can tell you what you need to know to make a decision right here and right now, based on those results.”

DL: We put as much emphasis, if not more, on interpreting those data. Computer programs can do all that. Interpret those data, then present them.

You have all this information. Give your boss three graphics and three pages of script that describes everything of importance in that database. If you can do that, you can be a hero to your boss.

TS: Given all the hands-on labs and programs you have, students probably have one great favorite and I think I can guess what it is. I believe you have an infomercial lab in the facility.

DL: We do. We’re just coming online with it. We haven’t used it yet. But when students walk in there and they see that, and once they get a chance to use it, every hambone in the world is going to come out of the woodwork, including Steve.

SB: Yes. Watch out, Ron Popeil!

TS: I’ll keep an eye out for you on late-night QVC, Steve. So do you have a real-life client lined up for that service yet?

DL: Two weeks from now, they’re coming in to start producing some video...some infomercials.

TS: What about the facility’s focus group room? Are those for real clients or are they simulations?

DL: Those are for real clients. One example is E.J. Thomas Performing Arts Center and the Civic Theatre, which have been doing traditional marketing: newspaper ads and magazines and things like that. Right now, we have three different student classes that are working with different target markets. The students are working to revamp the Arts Center and Theatre’s marketing program away from the traditional mass-advertising to more direct marketing. In other words, we asked the students how they would go about attracting more people from the student body. The E.J. Thomas Center is right by the campus. But the problem can be summed up in the words of one student, who said, “What is The Man of La Mancha? Is that a rock group?” Hardly any of what the Performing Arts Center is offering is known to the students. They don’t know Oklahoma! We may know the great Broadway shows, but these kids have entirely different tastes. And of course, think of where they get their information. They don’t read newspapers. They read magazines, and they read Web sites. If you’re going to reach that body, you have to go through entirely different channels.

Another example: We have “Zippy,” a kangaroo, as the mascot for the University of Akron (the zipper was invented in Akron). Last year, they started a new campaign called “Fear the Roo.” The kangaroo was very meanlooking. So we played off that, and created “Rock the Roo,” a cool-looking kangaroo. We had him in really cool sunglasses. We offered t-shirts. Students were lined up all the way around the center. We offered giveaways. We initiated all kinds of permission-based marketing: got their names, got permission to contact them — the whole nine yards. This was all done by students.

TS: Can you tell me a little more about your Internet Usability Lab? What’s that about?

DL: That’s one that’s almost done, but we’re waiting for some equipment. We call that “eyeballs and fingers,” because we’re going to have cameras, and we’ll also have a software program that, if you’re working through a Web site and get frustrated and click off, we’ll be able to study, via the cameras and the keystrokes, what is causing problems with Web surfing. And therefore design better Web sites.

TS: Tracking the exact point at which people abandon transactions?

DL: Right.

BH: And also record the body language of the user during the session.

DL: We’ll have the hard data from the software program, and the soft visual data from the video.

TS: That is very valuable.

DL: So are all our facilities. We’re renting them out like crazy. For instance, we have the best focus group research room in all of Northeastern Ohio. And our call center is booked up for the whole year.

SB: From a marketing perspective, we are middle America. We are the slice of America that marketers are after.

DL: The Taylor Institute is a totally selfsupporting unit. The only thing we get from the University is utilities. The professors are paid, but everything else: every piece of equipment, every piece of software, all the furnishings, the facility, all the operations, are all paid for. The only thing we don’t pay for is professors; that’s because they come in and teach university courses here. We are a new model of what higher education is going to have to be to thrive.

TS: You already touched on the fact that you have more demand than graduates, but once that pool gets larger, do you have a vehicle in place to help graduates get jobs?

DL: We do that, and in the college, we have a placement mechanism. The University has 18 full-time people dedicated to placement. We also do things like receptions for companies to come in and set up booths within the Taylor, and we invite students to come and look for internships. The best way to recruit is internships.

TS: Does Gary Taylor help craft the curriculum?

DL: Oh, yes. Gary is very active. He’s an entrepreneur, so he’s very interested in the entrepreneurial elements. He’s very interested in the curriculum, but also research and the internship program.

TS: In some traditional college settings, students are happy to memorize from books and pass tests just to graduate. With all the hands-on work the Taylor requires, do you find you’re getting a higher caliber of student? One who really wants to learn and master a profession? You can’t fake your way through lab exercises.

DL: It’s a lot harder to hide. Even in a lot of our groups, we have peer evaluation as well as professor evaluation. I’ll tell you what: if students think our professors are hard graders, they should look at some of their peers. They’re very tough. So yes, it is a lot harder, because you have small groups, so you can’t hide at the back of a 300-person lecture hall. We usually have photo seating charts to help us. We have a pretty good group of kids from a work ethic standpoint. About 80 percent of our students work 20 hours or more per week because they have to, to pay tuition. When you pay your own way through school, you have the tendency to be a lot tougher on yourself rather than when Mom and Dad do it. Their work ethic is significantly better than that found at the average residential school.

TS: You mentioned, last time I spoke with you, that you were launching a graduate program as well. Is that up and running?

DL: Not yet, we’re still working on that. We want it to be a success. A lot of MBA programs are sliding nowadays, so we’re looking to develop a program that we know a number of companies would support by paying for a few employees to attend the program. Once we get the program and those sponsors in place, then we’re going to launch the program. A lot of business education is drifting more toward the specialized areas. The general business is still big, but it’s losing ground to more specialized focuses.

TS: You mentioned that the response you’re getting from area businesses has been very good.

DL: Yes. With a recent donation, we’ll be putting in some new buyer behavior experimental research laboratories. We’ll be putting in some product development labs. Interactive Intelligence provided us with the software for our call center. We have another software program from Sivox, a simulation game for our call center to train our reps.

NT: Thank you very much for your time, gentlemen.

For more information about the Taylor Institute and the University of Akron, visit the University of Akron’s Web site at http://www.uakron.edu/colleges/cba. For more information about InfoCision Management Corp., visit (news - alert) http://www.infocision.com.

 

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