{"id":384872,"date":"2019-06-11T14:56:58","date_gmt":"2019-06-11T18:56:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=384872"},"modified":"2019-06-11T14:56:58","modified_gmt":"2019-06-11T18:56:58","slug":"business-majors-help-businesses-grow-384872","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/business-majors-help-businesses-grow-384872\/","title":{"rendered":"How Rochester business majors help area businesses grow"},"content":{"rendered":"

CloudCheckr is a small, but growing, young business that helps companies manage the flow of data to and from the cloud. While its customers have included the likes of Siemens Mobility, Cornell University, and several US Government agencies, executives at CloudCheckr wanted to know if it was worth pursuing a different market, namely smaller colleges and universities.<\/p>\n

To help get direction, the company turned to a group of undergraduate business majors at the URochester. The students were taking the course Marketing Projects and needed a company willing to use their research skills to address a real-world marketing issue. Todd Bernhard, product marketing manager at CloudCheckr, heard about the course from a coworker and thought some \u201cyoung blood\u201d would help provide some guidance.<\/p>\n

\u201cGoogle was doing well with higher education because they offer a variety of free services,\u201d says Bernhard. \u201cSo we had this hypothesis that universities would be ready to move from on-site data storage to the cloud.\u201d<\/p>\n

This spring, three seniors\u2014Jixuan Liu, Teddi Shapiro, and Zetian Xiao, all business majors\u2014took on the challenge of coming up with some answers.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe put together a diverse list of colleges and universities and started cold-calling the IT departments to connect with the people who actually knew about data storage,\u201d says Shapiro.<\/p>\n

The students found three main concerns at the colleges\u2014cost, security, and the possible loss of data. Shapiro says the team concluded that \u201cthere will be more of a market in the future. While the larger universities were starting to switch over to the cloud, the smaller ones were planning on staying with on-site data storage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the last 15 years, more than 700 students have addressed real-world marketing issues for local businesses as part of the Marketing Projects course.<\/div>\n

In the end, CloudCheckr\u2019s hypothesis was wrong, and that was fine by Bernhard.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s just as good to hear that your hypothesis is not true, as it is to hear that it is true,\u201d he says. \u201cThe students helped us understand that the smaller schools are not moving to the cloud very quickly, because they\u2019re scared.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why CloudCheckr, for the time being, will focus on educating decision makers at smaller colleges and universities, rather than marketing their services to those institutions.<\/p>\n

CloudCheckr was the latest company to benefit from Marketing Projects, a course taught by Vincent Hope, a clinical assistant professor at the Simon Business School<\/a>. For the last 15 years, Hope has given more than 700 students the opportunities to address real-world marketing issues for local businesses as part of the course. Initially, the course was only available to graduate students at Simon, but that changed in 2011 when the College and the Simon School collaborated to create the Barry Florescue Undergraduate Business Degree Program<\/a>. One of the first courses offered was Marketing Projects.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlong with providing a liberal arts education, we needed to do our part to prepare students for real jobs,\u201d says Richard Cardot, the faculty director at Simon. \u201cAnd an experiential course, like Vince\u2019s, is a great example of how to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hope knows firsthand the value of meeting clients\u2019 needs. Before joining the Simon faculty, he was president of a primary research company, Hope Reports, and served as director of strategic research and planning for the American Society for Quality. He\u2019s trying to teach his students exactly what he learned on the front lines: How to see things from the client\u2019s viewpoint and how to present complex information with both accuracy and simplicity.<\/p>\n

A case in point is VR Playground, which, unlike CloudCheckr, is a family-owned business with an exclusively local customer base. Russ Tartaglia and Marcy Pontius operate a virtual-reality arcade with a stated mission \u201cto bring game night back using awesome technology.\u201d Shortly after opening in early 2018, they had a list of marketing questions. How could we build brand awareness? What\u2019s the best way to reach potential customers? How do we communicate the nature of our business to people who have never heard of virtual reality?<\/p>\n

Tartaglia credits Hope\u2019s students with helping them see better ways to engage with customers. For example, the students recommended including hashtags on Instagram posts to connect with other arcades in the country in order to learn more about the industry. There was also a gentle reminder to respond to all reviews on social media.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know these things are important,\u201d says Pontius, \u201cbut in a start-up, when you\u2019re running every minute, it\u2019s easy to lose sight of the basics.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Hope tells his students, \u201cWhat the large companies do with technology and money, the smaller firms have to do in a shoestring fashion or through guerrilla marketing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hope\u2019s students are not simply getting valuable business experience; they\u2019re also learning how to work as a team, how to treat people, and how to interact with professionals.<\/p>\n

\u201cUltimately, the students are learning life rules, not just marketing rules,\u201d says Hope. \u201cAnd those are lessons that will help both in and out of the office.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Area businesses regularly tap into the research skills of Rochester business majors in Vincent Hope’s Marketing Projects course in order to help address the real-world marketing issues facing their companies. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":384992,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[26692,16072,10406],"class_list":["post-384872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus-community","tag-class-of-2019","tag-school-of-arts-and-sciences","tag-simon-business-school"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow Rochester business majors help area businesses grow<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"As part of their senior project for their Marketing Projects course, Rochester business majors conducted market research for local company CloudCheckr.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" 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