Students in Professor Nancy Vizenor’s Marketing Research course work with local businesses on a range of projects, whether it’s profiling customers or learning more about brand recognition. “They help businesses find out whatever it is they want to know. They conduct surveys, interpret the data and then make presentations with recommendations based on their findings,” said Vizenor.
Rumiano Cheese, a family-owned business based in Crescent City, has been manufacturing award-winning cheeses since 1921. Joby Rumiano, a fourth-generation cheesemaker, had heard about Vizenor’s class and this year decided to apply to become one of the four businesses to benefit from the students’ work. “We had been looking to do some branding, so this report will really help with that,” Rumiano said. The company currently offers 70 varieties of cheese, producing around 12 million pounds a year.
One of the things the market research revealed was that people in the Arcata area aren’t familiar with the company, despite its availability in several local supermarkets. “Rumiano makes a lot of different cheeses, so we recommend unifying the logo to help people recognize the brand,” said Kristy Tanner, a student participating in the National Student Exchange Program from Colorado.
“Back home, we don’t have anything like this. It was great to work directly with the businesses on a project like this. It was definitely very realistic,” said Tanner.
Another group of students looked into donor profiles for the Northern California Community Blood Bank, based in Eureka. Among their findings was that donor demographics range from young to old and don’t seem to be based on income. The students recommended that the blood bank reinforce its efforts to inform area residents about their eligibility to donate, the bank’s location and hours and the safety of the procedure. The students also urged blood bank recruitment director John Gullam to explore new forms of social media to spread the word. “With something like Twitter, people can check it from their cell phones, so if they want to know where the bloodmobile is that day, they can just look on the twitter feed and find out right there,” said Alex Kramer, a senior in Vizenor’s class.
For his part, Gullam was enthusiastic about interpreting the data. “We belong to a number of national organizations and they conduct marketing research so there are some statistics out there. But what they consider to be a small blood bank is significantly larger than we are. So, it’s great to have research that’s local and applies to our area and to a blood bank our size. The first thing I’m going to do when I get back to my office is run these numbers and see how we compare,” he said.
The course is a unique experience for School of Business students in the marketing option. Other businesses that have worked with the class include the Humboldt Crabs, Premier Financial Group, Redwood Coast Music Festivals, College of the Redwoods, HSU’s Natural History Museum, the Mad River Brewing Company and many more.
For more information on the class, contact Nancy Vizenor at (707) 826-6021 or ncv2@humboldt.edu.