This year, UNM is one of 10 schools nationwide to participate in the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers Recruitment Challenge, which is facilitated by EdVenture Partners, a “match-making nonprofit” that hosts annual collegiate competitions.
The top three participating schools will be invited to Houston to present their research campaign and results to AFPM and industry executives, according to an official statement from the Anderson School of Management. The top team will receive a scholarship prize of $5,000, second place $3,000 and third place $1,000.
The challenge is meant to establish relations between industrial organizations in need of a millennial touch and undergraduate marketing programs throughout the country, as well as provide students with real-world marketing experience.
Undergraduates in the Anderson digital marketing course formed a student-run agency to develop and implement the campaign with a $1,000 budget provided by AFPM.
Carter Uhl, co-director of the campaign’s creative team, said the most flagrant issue recognized by his team was that of AFPM’s current logo, which, from a millennial perspective, embodies a fossil-fuel dependent past and ultimately lacks in attention-garnering details.
“For the creative team, I guess our biggest job was probably to redesign their logo,” Uhl said. “Their [current] logo [is this] kind of old school, red-white-and-blue type logo, and we kind of want to stray away from that image; we basically just wanted to rebrand AFPM.”
In an effort to modernize and refine the brand-image surrounding AFPM, which is “a trade association representing high-tech American manufacturers of virtually the entire U.S. supply of gasoline,” Uhl said he and his team made drastic changes to the logo’s color scheme and overall artwork.
“We tried to make it [fresher], more modern; something that would appeal to millenials,” he said. “So we changed the colors to blue, green, and gray - something that kind of gave off more of a positive feeling when you saw it, something that kind of gave off a clean [feeling]. We wanted to go for an energy type thing, but we were trying to make it look more appealing than it had already been.”
For millennials, there is an ominous ring to words like “fuel” and “petrochemicals”, Uhl said. In order to counteract the harsh connotations surrounding the fossil fuel industry, it became necessary for his team to do their best to soften the organization’s image.
In this capacity, Uhl said AFPM is effectively enlisting the services of undergraduate students on a client-representative basis.
“I kind of wish that we had a little bit more freedom to work with what [AFPM already] had, because we kind of had to do most of (this) stuff from scratch,” he said, “but it was kind of nice too, because they basically let us take whatever direction we wanted. ”
Christian Bourque, a senior in Anderson’s business marketing program, is serving as head of this year’s Public Relations team.
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“We’ve been in it consistently for three years now,” he said. “What we do, essentially, us along with competing schools, is we create full-encompassing, integrative marketing campaigns, and 100 percent of what we do is done by students. So we do everything from social media, web advertisements, research - everything you really need to have a full-scale, successful campaign.”
Participation in events such as these, which provide students with real world experience in a variety of their potential career-fields, is the cornerstone of an effective educational experience, Bourque said, only that the students typically enjoy the “controlled climate” generated in the classroom.
“There’s only so much that you can learn in a lecture setting,” Uhl said, “before you actually need to, you know, ‘take it to the streets.’”
Johnny Vizcaino is a staff reporter at the Daily Lobo. Contact him at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter
@thedailyjohnnyv.
