4A: Opportunity Belief

Robert Rodriguez

May 22, 2019

ENT3003

Prof. Pryor

Opportunity Belief

I believe there is an unmet need when it comes to the marketing of student programs and business ideas. The community of the University of Florida is often at the forefront of ideas, innovation, or social events; however, we lack a uniform, effective way to communicate across the community. There is an opportunity to create a forum to interact across interest groups in the UF community. This need is present among starting businesses, artist, social groups and established companies. This need has always existed and been solved in other ways, but not to the personal level here at the University of Florida. 

#1: Artist struggling to gain followers.

               Question: How long have you been in music?

               Answer: Three Years now, but I have known my bandmates for years before. We came from the same small town.

Question: Where and where do you play?

               Answer: Usually small bars and places around town.

Question: On average, how many people come to your shows?

               Answer: Typically, 30-50 people come to our shows for us, but we’ve performed in front of a couple hundred before.

Question: How do you market your shows?

               Answer: We have A group page and use flyers around campus. That is really time-consuming and can be frustrating since sometimes they take down our flyers.

Question: Who would you say your main audience is?

               Answer: College students. They are mainly who we perform to.

Question: What do you consider to be the best tool you have to market your shows?

               Answer: For new Fans? The Flyers. They help get the word out about the shows which get the people to come and then become listeners and fans.

Question:  What would you change about the “flyer.” system?

               Answer: I would like there to be more places to place them where people would see them, and you wouldn’t have to compete for space.

Reflection: This artist’s shows are every couple of weeks, and therefore, he is continually posting more flyers for every show. This wastes paper and creates garbage. A forum to post these updates without removing the previous would be useful. The medium would have to be updateable and public to attract new traffic.

#2: Community leader:

Question: What community group do you work for?

               Answer: I work for (local church) organizing charity events and fundraisers.

Question: How often do you have these events?

               Answer: Every weekend almost. Sometimes 2 times a week.

Question: Who do you often see coming to these events?

               Answer: Typically, older people in there late 30s-40s. They are most often the ones that come to the church.

Question: How do you notify parishioner that don’t attend the church weekly about events or changes to events?

               Answer: I often am hesitant to make changes that affect attendance after that Sunday or Wednesday because they might not find out till its too late. If necessary, I have a call list and a group chat that I use, but it is a hassle.

Question: How do you attract new members?

               Answer: We grow by word of mouth and by our charity events.

Question: Do you advertise these events to the community?

               Answer: We have a hard time to market our events outside of the community.

Reflection: The community event organizer has a difficult time creating traffic to his events because the community at large is unaware of his activities. The church community shrinking is a macro trend and doesn’t specifically speak towards this church. The church ability to reverse this trend would be difficult for any parish. The church drive towards new parishioners would be aided by a program to speak to UF students.  

#3: Local business leader:

Question: How do you market your business to the local community?

               Answer: I use local advertisements on the radio and other digital forms of marketing to creating a popular attraction.

Question: do you focus on UF students when you market your restaurant?

Answer: yes, we focus on UF students because they are often the group that drives the majority of our sales.  

Question: How do you target them specifically?

Answer: We target them by creating marketing promotions that attract them specifically, and by creating set demographic sets in digital marketing.

Question: Do you have a mailing list or some sort of database for your most frequent customers?

Answer: No. We don’t have that information.

Reflection: The business owner didn’t seem to have a set group of his loyal customers or a set collection of attributes that separated his customers. He relied heavily on his location and his exterior marketing to attract customers. This means that he couldn’t relay changes or information to his customer base quickly if necessary, although, restaurants typically don’t need to do that.

Summary: My questions indicated to me that there is a need for a forum or a new type of group communication throughout the university. My original idea is still here as I figured the system would have to have many uses to spread to all of UF. The closest parallel to this is the UF email account database that sends ads to the UF email lists, but that is closed to only a select group of businesses and users. This could not be used to share ideas or update information as the new information would be a separate email. This system would have to access to all users and be able to be segmented into a group, while also being able to create new traffic for ideas. The information given to me by these potential users has changed some of the ideas I had. Entrepreneurs should change their plans based on the new knowledge and experience that they have, but stay constant in how they think the problem could be solved. The main premise shouldn't change because others don't see it in the same way.