CIT students are top of the class

Last week saw the culmination of a successful collaboration between the Cork Independent and final year marketing students at CIT, with one student taking home top prize of €1,000.

100 fourth year Bachelor of Business (Honours) in Marketing students spent weeks doing market research and formulating strategies for the Cork Independent.

As part of their Marketing Portfolio module, each group of students was responsible for designing research - including questionnaires, focus groups, and interviews, carrying out this research and analysing the findings. In addition to gaining learning credit, the class competed for the prize of €1,000 awarded to the top performing team.

Managing Director of Cork Independent Jarlath Feeney said: “It was amazing to have 100 marketeers working on our behalf and engaging with the people of Cork on their views about the Cork Independent. We were delighted with the positive response we got from our readers through the students' research, but more importantly, they gave us quite a lot to work on for us to become even more relevant to and engaged with the public of Cork.

“My congratulations to all the students for their excellent work, and to Pio and Michele from CIT who were brilliant partners to work with on this project. And of course a special mention to the overall winners, Ciara, Emily and Rachel - great job!” he said.

The winning team consisted of Rachel Caulfield, Ciara Collins, and Emily Stack.

Rachel Caulfield said that “working with the Cork Independent on a real live case was an excellent opportunity for my team members and I to put the knowledge and skills we have acquired from our marketing course into practice. The most enjoyable element of this live case was getting to use our creativity skills to suggest recommendations that the Cork Independent can implement in the future. It was a pleasure to work with such a great brand.”

The students spent eight weeks working on this live case, under the direction of their lecturer Michele McManus.

“This was an excellent project for our fourth-year students, and one that significantly challenged them. The Cork Independent presented us with a clear business problem, and students really enjoyed the opportunity to put their market research skills to practice for the benefit of such a worthy Cork brand. We are hugely grateful to the entire team at the Cork Independent for the substantial time and effort dedicated to directing our students during this collaboration,” Michele McManus said.

The Covid-19 restrictions altered the nature of the competitive element of this live case. Instead of live presentations by ten of the best teams, there was an online final last week, with the top three teams (chosen by Michele McManus) presenting their key findings.

This type of ‘live case’ assignment has been an integral component of modules in the department of Marketing and International Business for many years. Some of the businesses that have been the subject of a live case in the last academic year include Cork Airport, Mallow Racecourse, West Cork Model Railway, Motorsport Ireland, Kinetica, SuperValu, Longueville House Beverages and Cummins Sports.

The department achieved formal recognition of this work in the form of the Business Collaboration Award at the 2020 Education Awards held in Dublin in February.

“Here at CIT we put huge effort into making sure our students are ready for the real-world; working with companies on their every-day problems is key to our ability to do that. Shortly CIT will be re-designated as Munster Technological University (MTU) and we plan on making sure that the new university represents that same emphasis,” said Dr Pio Fenton, Head of Department of Marketing and International Business.