A Toast to a
MEMORABLE CAPSTONE PROJECT It might sound a little like a job from Mission Impossible: Starting in August, form a
students aren’t marketing majors. Glynn, O’Sullivan and Markey are all finance majors.
group from amongst your classmates and develop a twoyear marketing campaign for a product that isn’t on the market yet, while taking other classes, doing assignments, handling exams and possibly looking for a job. Oh, and it’s due for presentation before Thanksgiving.
The students had a lot on their plates as they set out to work on the challenge. “We started out really looking at the charge we were given and then looking to understand more of the seltzer category as a whole because we needed to understand that in order to really figure out what was good positioning for them. Doing the research behind it, we were looking at Barefoot and working out who they are as a brand,” Kessler noted. “Once we could understand both what they’re entering and who they are, it made it a lot easier for us to find a position after that.”
That’s the challenge that students in Jan Taylor’s Marketing 495 capstone class took on this fall. The client, E&J Gallo Winery, is launching a new Barefoot-brand seltzer drink this year.The hard seltzer market is already a crowded one, but the company believes in its unique appeal as a winebased product and a household name in wine. “Sometimes it feels like it’s been six weeks since we started, and sometimes it feels like six days,” senior finance major Alec Glynn said. The class split into several groups to work on the challenge. Glynn was in a group with Collin O’Sullivan, Nicole Kessler, Garret Markey and Emily Leach. Interestingly, despite the class being a marketing capstone, many of the
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The groups also did a lot of customer research to discover what consumers were already drinking, what they liked or disliked, and what they wanted in a hard seltzer. “Once we found that, it was more of putting the puzzle together, trying to understand the feeling that we wanted to have Barefoot put out in their new product and how that was actually going to fit in with the research that we’d collected,” Kessler said.
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