Hey everyone! For those of you who may not know me, my name is Katie and I will be going on a marketing-esque adventure for my senior interactive multimedia project. I have partnered with a small food chain in North Jersey called Tito’s Burritos & Wings. I have been working as their Marketing Coordinator for the past year and I plan to take the skills that I learned within the IMM program, and apply them to improve many different facets of the company. My main objectives are to launch a marketing campaign around a new line of merchandise that I will design, to film/edit promotional food videos for each store location, to improve the app interface, and to complete any other projects in this realm that evolve over the next year that require my assistance. I think that my main focuses will be the promotional videos and the merchandise launch because the app interface is not a huge target for the company at this point in time.
So far, I have had a meeting with the entire marketing department, including the overall owner of Tito’s, and they all were completely on board with assisting the vision for my project. This was the biggest step because if they were not interested in the ideas that I have for the company, obviously this project would not be attainable. However, they were extremely encouraging and threw more ideas in my direction than I knew what to do with. The other progress so far is that I completed about 10 pages of a rough draft for my paper which is a pretty solid foundation.
My next step is to assess what articles of clothing are desired from our target audience in order to make sure that I am designing pieces that will do well when it comes to sales. I plan to gather data by taking polls on all of our social media platforms and possibly surveying customers in person when they come to pick up their food. I plan to take this step within the next few weeks so that I can then narrow down what pieces will be my focus before starting the design and marketing campaign process. Then, I also want to start outlining my ideas for the videos in terms of style, which food orders will be highlighted, staff involvement, equipment, etc. I plan to do most of the filming/editing within the next semester, hoping to possibly have access to some studio equipment and less restrictions on filming with other people due to safety.
In terms of issues thus far, I guess I am just feeling internal stress and as if I am supposed to be doing so much more than I currently am. In order to help settle this fear, I want to make a timeline/outline for all of the activities that I plan to complete. I think it would also be good to keep a log of everything that I have done so far. Due to this thesis being a combination of a bunch of separate projects within the company, I want to make sure that I don’t lose track of all of the contributions I will make over the course of the next year or lose sight of what my goals are. I think that this project will be subject to change as new needs arise from the company. For example, a national food holiday is occurring in November that I will be responsible for creating a marketing campaign around on social media. I want to make sure to keep track of all of these vague projects that come together to form the entirety of my thesis.
Here is the restaurant’s link in case anyone is interested in the overall vibe of the company: https://www.titosburritos.com. You can also check out the current merchandise in case anyone happens to have any helpful suggestions on what I should design! Thank you for reading 🙂