Portfolio
Kenwood Elementary School
Increase Brand Awareness - "Kenwood Kids are Built to Solve"
Integrated Marketing Campaign | Market Research | Advertising
As a team of five people, we pitched an integrated marketing campaign with the creative concept, “Kenwood kids are built to solve”, to help our client, Kenwood Elementary School, promote their new computer science and computing thinking curriculum and increase their brand awareness in the neighborhood.
We interviewed parents, teachers, and staff at the family info
center of Champaign Unit 4 District to find insights that led us to our creative concept, and built a campaign around it. The campaign contains several media such as direct mail, brochure, press release, website, video, event and social media. It is aim to show parents what Kenwood kids can do by showing their work and capability that cannot be shown on test scores on the school report card.
CLIENT: Kenwood Elementary School in Champaign, Illinois, USA
SCOPE: Approx. 4 months (January, 2016 - April, 2016)
TOOLS & METHODS: Qualitative Research, Desk Research, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Wix
MY ROLE: Art Director, Idea Generator, Researcher
TEAM: A five-people team which works as a small ad agency. Every member takes a role in either Art Director, Copywriter, Creative Director, Strategist, Media Planner or Account Manager, but we collaborate in conducting a market research and brainstorming for ideas.
Introduction
Kenwood Elementary school is a magnet school* with a computer science emphasis in Champaign, Illinois. They have students from various kinds of family backgrounds and many of them come from families that are struggling with their economic situation. Thus, Kenwood Elementary school doesn’t always have pretty test scores on the school report card.
Now with their new computer science and computing thinking curriculum, they would like to shy away from their previous image by creating a new brand image as a technology emphasized school and promoting their new curriculum to attract more parents to send their children to Kenwood.
** Magnet schools are public schools with specialized courses or curricula
Our Process
Research
We collected primary and secondary information through interviews and the internet to understand what situation was Kenwood Elementary School was facing and how they could find a niche point to talk to the right audience. Here are some of the questions that we aimed to find the answers to:
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What kind of brand image does Kenwood Elementary School have?
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How do parents decide elementary school for their children?
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How do they gather information about choosing elementary school for their children? What kind of tools do they use for research?
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What are the crucial criteria for the parents when they are choosing elementary school?
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What kind of parents will relate most to the new brand image of Kenwood Elementary School?
Target Audience - Supportive Earners and Learners
After going through several articles and websites such as Mintel and Chambanamoms.com, and interviewing several Kenwood parents with the help of our clients, we create a persona that we believed is the group that Kenwood Elementary School should target to.
Insights
Choosing a school for their children was an overwhelming process for parents in Champaign Unit District 4, and parents were uneasy making choices on their own. Unfortunately, the family info center was not helping much and there weren’t many tangibles for parents to make assessment on what a good school is besides the test scores. Therefore parents tended to overvalue test scores when it comes to school choice.
The Big Idea (Creative Concept)
When you simply look at the test scores of Kenwood Elementary School you would know that it is no parent’s first choice; however, with their new computer science/computational thinking curriculum, the children in Kenwood are taught to have a maker spirit and a problem solving mind, which could not be reflected in test scores. Thus, we believe that the best way to have parents considering Kenwood Elementary School for their children is to show them what students in Kenwood are capable of.
Creative Executives
Word-of-mouth and social media play a big part in parents decision process; therefore, it is important for us to spread the words both online and offline. We decided to reach to these parents with social media channels and offline activities at community events as our major touch points with our target audience, along with some traditional media, such as direct mails and press release.
Social Media Revamp
57% of our target audience use social media as one of their major information sources; hence it is important that our client have a strong brand presence. To improve their current social media presence, we made brand assets as a guideline for what to use on social media, print materials and at the events. We’ve chosen fonts, colors and the logos our client should use so the community can recognize Kenwood when they see the blue and white stars
Press Release
Kenwood values their community, not just within the school itself, but also within the district. Since Kenwood is actively involved in the community, we want to make it known all the projects and complex problems Kenwood is solving by sending press releases to News-Gazette, SCIA, SmilePolitely, ChambanaMoms.
Portfolio Website with monthly social media challenges
Another great way to showcase students’ work is through a portfolio website, and to engage with the community, we designed a monthly challenge event on social media. Every month, we will show up a problem on our portfolio website and invite the audience to solve the problem using computational thinking by publishing the link on the social media. At the end of the month, the student will reveal the solution both on the website and on the social media. We will also invite parents to provide their problems for future monthly challenges. And this is a way to engage with the target audience and help build awareness of Kenwood.
Takeaways
Multiple perspectives are crucial for a good research. I learned that the same story could be told differently depending on people’s roles. The end users, delivery drivers, and the online food delivery platform companies all had different needs and comments when it comes to food delivery. Therefore it’s important to interview different people in various positions in the industry you are researching in order to get the whole picture.
Another thing I learned was that observation is as important as the interviews. By observing interviewees’ actions and the things they used, you could discover more insights than purely asking questions to the interviewees, and it also helped broaden the interviews if you asked the interviewees about the fact that you observed.
I also learned that an interview should be a comfortable conversation instead of a Q&A session. I was too focused on the interview questions at the beginning that I wasn’t able to think outside of my own hypothesis and was only able to obtain little information. However, when you created and facilitated a comfortable environment for the interviewees to talk, the answers you wanted to know would come out from the interviewees’ mouths before you even asked the questions which you had prepared.
**Last Note: This project is still an ongoing project on the client side after this research. With our insights, the client is now developing their compressor box to better fit the market needs.They have also flew to southeast Asian to have the first contact with the local partners we connected for them to discuss this new business plan and future partnership.