The days of a successful marketer selling products door to door with a script are gone. In MKTG 457: Personal Selling and Sales Management, I learned the importance of “solution-selling” for this generation. With a customer orientation, marketers have to place the customer’s interests ahead of their own and seek to deliver solutions that are problem-based. Customers will not want a product unless you can show them how it fulfills their need or solves their problem. Therefore, to be successful in sales, you have to be able to build rapport, identify your customer needs, and position a solution to their problem. I am not pursuing a career in marketing. Instead, I plan to work in Higher Education and Student Affairs. However, this solution-selling framework is what marks my growth working in the Office of Parent and Family Programs.

        My internship in the Parent and Family office gave me the opportunity to work in communications. As an intern for the office, I have been able to craft our monthly e-newsletter that is sent out to the Parent Association. First, I ask campus partners what information they would like included for the month. Next, I decide what information to include, where on the newsletter it should land, and how I should depict it. When I started this assignment close to two years ago, I was blindly copying the information sent from the partners into the newsletter. I was using the same template every month. I was not critically thinking about the information or how that information should be shared. 
      When I took MKTG 457, I began to think differently about the newsletter process. I realized that our office is a channel of communication and therefore, it is our role to disseminate useful and relevant information to parents. Now when I receive the information forms from campus partners, I ask myself questions: Does this read for parents? Is it critical that parents know this information this month? Can this information be better shared in another platform other than the e-newsletter? I started asking myself these questions because I realized that since we are here to support parents, we have to orient our communication to their needs and problems. 
       I am most proud of my recent newsletters because of the intentionality and purpose that was put into every line. Every decision about the letter was made using my “solution-selling” orientation. Over the course of a semester, the director of communication who reviews the newsletter complemented our office on the improvement. We also saw more engagement from parents with an increase in the open rate and click rate of the newsletter. It is exciting to see my marketing material take shape in my Higher Education experiences. It has highlighted for me the importance of intentional, stakeholder communication.
       In the Parent and Family Office, I also update and add to our Parent and Family App. When my new supervisor started, as director of the office, she began to look critically at all modes of communication that we offer. Our app was not being used to its full potential. Together, we questioned its purpose. We saw it as a one-stop shop for families, so the first change I wanted to make was to its elevator pitch. An elevator pitch is a quick 30 second to 1-minute speech that sells your product. In other words, I wanted to change how we marketed our app. 
       I wanted to market the app as a solution. To do that, as an office we had to recognize the problem. Parents receive so much information, but it can feel decentralized. Besides the newsletter, they do not have one place they can go with helpful information catered for them. That is the problem. Our solution is the Parent and Family programs app. In artifact one, you can see the app’s home page with the blurb I wrote to explain our purpose to parents. It reads, “The Office of Parent and Family Programs recognizes the critical role that families play in their student’s college success. To assist, this app is crafted to consolidate need-to-know and helpful information. It provides quick and easy access to important webpages, campus partners, and us”. I wanted a short and sweet pitch that tells parents our app is their solution.
      I have been lucky enough to see the fruits of my efforts. In the last year, the office has seen an increase in the number of app downloads. As I have continued in this role, I have learned that I enjoy orienting myself with my “customer” and curating my communications to fulfill their need. Artifact two is a copy of my final project in MKTG 457 where I used the solution selling method to sell to our Barbie customers. MKTG 457 and this internship have shown me a new framework for how I can best support stakeholders. These experiences have made me think more critically about information and have made me more creative as a communicator.