06 July, 2015

The Need

When Valeo Foods teamed up with CIT 3rd Year Marketing students the challenge was to devise a professional marketing communications campaign and find novel ideas for their new product launch of Chef Ketchup.

The Solution

Working in a team-based environment, marketing students devised marketing communication campaigns for Chef Ketchup, focusing on advertising, experiential marketing, social media, sales promotion and sponsorship. Ensuring that all the promotional tools were working together to communicate a consistent message to the consumer was key to the brief. The campaigns were showcased as part of a ‘Live Assessment’ to members of the Valeo Foods team, CIT staff and students. The top five groups from the showcase were then selected to pitch at the ‘Chef Ketchup CIT Live Case Competition’. AnneMarie Kelly, Senior Brand and Events Manager at Valeo Foods said the engagement gave Valeo Foods a fresh perspective, new ideas and challenged their thinking on the subject. It also introduced the company to a new batch of up and coming marketing talent.

Critical Success Factors

"We got a different view of things from people who are a lot closer to our target audience than we are and some fantastic ideas that I can see us using in various different formats in the future", Ms Kelly said. “Given the amount of effort I have seen from the students, how passionate they have been about the project and the amount of effort they have put in over the last number of weeks, I’d encourage any company to get involved.”

Benefits of the Engagement

The pitches gave each group the opportunity to demonstrate the level of commitment, creativity and planning they had invested in their campaign. Students were in total agreement that working on a live case was completely different to working on a college presentation or project. Lecturer Lisa Scannell, who facilitated the partnership with Valeo, knows these interactions are vital for undergraduates. “Enabling students to work with industry professionals gives them a significant advantage in their future careers. Partnering with industry stakeholders like Valeo Foods ensures that CIT remains at the cutting edge of current industry practices. Bringing the real world in to the lecture theatre is at the heart of what we do in CIT”.

“Given the amount of effort I have seen from the students, how passionate they have been about the project and the amount of effort they have put in over the last number of weeks, I’d encourage any company to get involved.” AnneMarie Kelly, Senior Brand and Events Manager, Valeo Foods.

“Enabling students to work with industry professionals gives them a significant advantage in their future careers.” Lisa Scannell Lecturer in School of Business, CIT.

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