Why did I choose this topic, and what do I hope to learn or gain through studying it?

When beginning this project I had a vague idea of what I wanted to choose for the project. Marketing in itself is a very interesting field, but one that doesn't sound like something entertaining enough for me. However, I realized that marketing has a psychological side to it, if your advertisement doesn't make a consumer interested or happy, they won't want to buy your advertised product. I have recently been very interested in learning what these tricks are. What colors make a consumer more likely to press add to cart? How do you market a line of clothes effectively to make it pleasing to the eye? These are all questions I've wondered for a long time, and through the research and internship of this project I hope to be able to answer them. I would like to learn better methods to create more appealing school projects and advertisements, along with understanding the methods behind marketing a line of products. Marketing is a field I do not know much about, but I am interested in studying it in college, so getting to research this topic for a project will hopefully help me gain valuable experience that I can use in my future. I also chose this topic because my partner, Maria Peterson, is interested in the data analytics side of marketing, while I find the psychological aspect more interesting. This creates an effective balance between the two sides of marketing so we can both work in an area that interests us more. This week, Maria and I completed the "Choosing your Topic" assignment and picked ten marketing agencies to reach out to regarding an internship. We also spoke with our senior mentor, as we were having trouble deciding something significant to do for our community that ties into marketing. She came up with some good ideas, such as working with the mental health counselor at our school. We plan to reach out to marketing agencies on Monday, since that gives them the week to reply and the emails are not sitting over the weekend. 

When beginning this project, I found myself overwhelmed by conducting a project on something I had little to no experience with. I realized that that is the goal of the project, to pick a topic I know little about, and turning it into a learning experience. I already have an understanding of the basics of psychology, and know how it can be used in marketing in a few ways, such as using colors to convey different moods or attributes. Some of my weaknesses include a lack of knowledge of marketing, which is why my internship is at a marketing firm, so that I can learn the basics of marketing before connecting it with my existing knowledge of psychology. To use the best of my strengths I can conduct further research regarding psychology, including information that can be considered relevant to marketing. Minimizing my weaknesses is  my main goal through my internship and research, as I hope to gain a thorough understanding of how my mentor and other employees at my internship understand marketing and use psychology on a daily basis to conduct their jobs in various aspects. 

Currently as of October 5th, I have begun my community service by creating graphics related to Suicide Prevention Month. In addition we are currently brainstorming other potential community service opportunities in our community to reach more hours and experience, as our graphics have not been posted or shared yet. We begin our internship next week, and I am excited to meet everybody and begin my internship, as the Idea Center seems like a welcoming environment that will help us learn. I am also apprehensive, as I never never done an internship or worked in a professional environment, but I am hopeful that Mr. Martin understands that and will explain what the process of the internship to ease any troubles.

One challenge that I have faced during my capstone project was community service. First, I was working with the mental health counselor at our school, but once suicide prevention month passed and we had a week long break in the fall, the three of us lost touch as she seemed busy working with other students. Our graphics were never posted so there was no pressure to continue making them with a specific theme or anything, so we decided to focus on our internship and then go another route once we had completed it.

Maria figured out what she wanted to do and already had the approval and membership in the club she wanted to do it with, so I was stumped, as finding community service for marketing is rather difficult. I then switched my focus to finding community service I could market, and that subtle change broadened my horizons. I am a person who loves animals, so I decided something that would have a community impact and also impact to myself was working with the local animal shelter to help them promote or even organize some sort of adoption event. After reaching out to them, they said no. I understood that it was an unusual request that they did not have the time for, but I felt defeated, and that I was right back where I started. I decided to stick to this idea, and not give up yet. I reached out to Goochland Animal Lovers and the Richmond SPCA, and received a reply saying that the Richmond SPCA would try to accommodate my request.

So far I still have no specific confirmation, but I will continue to monitor my email and follow up shortly before I go on vacation for winter break. While I have no concrete solution to this challenge right now, I am relieved to have an idea of what I want to do and to have my internship completed.

When gathering information and sources for my research paper, the most challenging task for me was finding the sources that were broad enough to answer my question. The field of marketing and psychology is one that is not new, so the basics have been covered for decades. Some of the sources I found that were simply the psychology of marketing were very old (some were from the 1950s), so I was hesitant to use them. I decided to gather as many sources as I could to have specific studies or instances that I could cite to prove my points. However, I still needed a more broad source to back up my more broad claims. I had already searched multiple databases, so I went searching for books. I found some books that looked interesting, but I stumbled across one that focused on the science of why consumers purchase specific things and how they behave: Why We Buy. I decided to use this one, since it looked at the science behind marketing from both the consumer and the seller’s point of view. 

My outline was a daunting task that I was worried about having enough information to accomplish, but I found that breaking my paper down into specific sections, then using the source that provided the best information for that section was a tactic that made outlining it seem less intimidating. Although it was definitely a very rough draft, it helped me understand more about my project and how I wanted to report it, and splitting it up let me use a variety of sources to cover more ground than just answering my extremely broad question. Of course as I continue to write it I plan to search for more information, as I have never captured it all, along with diving deeper into Why We Buy.

Currently in my project, I am about to begin my community service with the RSPCA, helping them plan and market their annual Dog Jog on Saturday, March 23. They have been wonderful to work with so far, and they were very accommodating of my constricted schedule. It is definitely a relief to have this figured out, and all of my community service hours will be completed with the Dog Jog.

My goals for my capstone project were slightly different when I started. My topic has stayed the same and my research is consistent with what I was hoping to learn, and I feel that I have learned a significant amount and am confident in my project. The only major change was my community service, which I did not have a set in stone goal for at the beginning of the year. I do, however, consider it as a goal that changed for me when I had to pivot, but I am very happy with what I ended up doing and the impact it has, both on the community and myself. 

When imagining my project, I wanted to make it something that has an impact, as marketing is definitely not an extremely humanitarian field. Considering the importance of other students’ projects both to themselves and others, I wanted to find a way to tie my interest in psychology into something that I believed in. Through my time at the Richmond SPCA, I have learned just how critical fundraisers such as the Dog Jog are for them. Currently, they have raised $170,000 from the Dog Jog, and are $30,000 ahead of where they were last year. The Richmond SPCA gets almost all of its funding from fundraising, so success for events like these is critical for them being able to take care of 4,000 animals a year. During my time there, I have seen the care they put into making the environment welcoming and relaxing, and I am proud to be helping them for my community service.

Currently in my project my presentation is almost completed, I may make a few changes before I present next Thursday. I am nervous about my presentation, but I am confident in my ability to speak about the importance of what I have completed during my senior project.

Below: Helping at the Richmond SPCA on March 11 as they prepare for the Dog Jog.

Throughout my experience during my senior capstone project, I have learned a lot about myself and the field I plan to pursue after college. I knew I was interested in marketing prior to beginning the project, but I wasn’t 100% sure if that was still my passion. I was hesitant because marketing along with business as a whole is a very corporate field, and I wanted to do something more. During my time at the Idea Center and the Richmond SPCA, I got to see a new side of marketing I hadn’t considered before.

Barry Martin, President of the Idea Center, sat down with me and spoke about how he started the Idea Center. He spoke about how it was founded around the rise of the internet, and how he wanted to prove that marketing could make a difference in people’s lives. He explained that this is why the Idea Center takes on a lot of medical clients, to make medical care more accessible for those unsure or intimidated while searching for a doctor. This perspective really stuck with me throughout the rest of my time there and my time at the Richmond SPCA. I have always loved animals, so I was eager to help a non-profit organization that helps so many animals. All of the development team that I worked with had such a fervor for their jobs. They were able to make mundane planning or budgeting jobs interesting through their love for animals. They reminded me what this work was for, with some of them even having animals they adopted at the Richmond SPCA in their offices whenever I was there.

Working with both of these companies was very important to me, because it helped me see a new side of marketing that I hadn’t yet considered, and that refreshed my perspective of the business world. I learned that there are so many people who truly love their jobs and what they do, and are eager to share that. I was nervous to reach out to big companies, and hesitant to take the first offer from an internship/community service opportunity, but I would not change anything about the people I worked with. They were all welcoming and valued my opinions, despite me being a high school student just shadowing them. 

To someone doing this project in the future, I would recommend that they take a look at what aspects of their project are important to them, and reach out to people or companies that share their ideas. For example, I value working with smaller teams that truly enjoy helping people, so I felt that I fit right in at both my PLE and community service. I believe that this experience will help me in the future throughout college and for years to come. While I am not certain I will go into the marketing field, as of now I plan to study advertising in college, where my work with both the Idea Center and the Richmond SPCA will truly benefit me.