Académique Documents
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Culture Documents
The Vidette
MKT 232
May 1st, 2018
Kelsey Franklin, Cuauhtemoc
Mendoza, Emily Chiarello, Matt
Olson, Ali Hook, Myia Agustin,
Kevin Madsen
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Table of Contents
A. Executive Summary……………………………………………………………………...2
E. Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………….…9
F. Appendix …………………………………………………………………………….….10
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Executive Summary
The Vidette, which is the campus newspaper for Illinois State University, is currently
experiencing brand recognition and brand awareness problems. The primary audience that the
Vidette is targeting are Undergraduate and Graduate students who attend Illinois State
University, but they want to place an extra emphasis on freshmen and transfer students. They
also get a considerable amount of international views, so they are targeting International Students
as well. The sections of the Vidette that get the most views are Crime and New Openings such as
when Portillos opened. The main questions that the Vidette wishes to know are why students
aren’t following them on social media, picking up the paper, and what type of content the
students look for in the newspaper? They also want to know why students are not interacting
with them on twitter even though they have over 6,000 followers. The main goal of this project
that the Vidette is hoping to accomplish is to increase their overall brand awareness. In order for
us to help the Vidette resolve their brand recognition problem and help them to achieve their
main goal, we need to first establish the source of the problem and figure out why Illinois State
University students are not familiar with the Vidette. When conducting both qualitative and
quantitative studies throughout the semester, our group has heard from many of ISU’s students
regarding their knowledge of the Vidette. Members from our group sent out a survey to
multiple different RSO’s and the residents of Cardinal Court. We only received 41 responses to
our survey, however we gained sufficient insight on some of the main issues that the Vidette will
need to focus on. For example, according to Graphs 4&5 below, 85% percent of respondents
answered that they had previously heard of the Vidette, however 85% of the respondents also
answered that they did not follow the Vidette on any Social Media platforms. Leading us to a
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key issue on Social Media viewership that will be discussed further later in the paper. When
performing our qualitative studies, we held a focus group, and had multiple casual interviews
with many different students who were walking in the halls of the College of Business. When
speaking with these students, we asked a variety of different questions, many of them asking
about what the students would enjoy to see in their newspaper, and what would make them
actually take a physical copy from a stand. Many students responded to this saying that they
would take a copy if there were coupons in the newspaper. We gained a great deal of insightful
information when speaking with these students that will be covered more in depth.
Our research project was centered around The Vidette, which is Illinois State
University’s school newspaper. The Vidette came to our Marketing 232 course in search of
answers to what it seemed like bottomless questions. One of the major concerns for that the staff
explicitly stated was the issue of brand recognition. The two representatives from The Vidette,
stated that many students are no longer interested in the newspaper. During The Vidette
presentation, we collected possible questions that would require extensive research that would
hopefully bring us to a solution to solve the brand recognition issue. Many of the questions were
centered around content, channel and the age of students across campus. We wanted to know the
type of content that would grab students’ attention, what is the best channel to gain readers and
what ages were typically reading The Vidette. All of these questions were asked via focus groups
and surveys. Collectively, we believe we have conquered the major issue of brand recognition
Qualitative Research
The methods used for our interview process was fairly simple, we looked up the number
of students on campus then separated by gender, major, and year in school. We reached out to
these students, and from the few that came, they were rewarded with Giordano’s Pizza. The rest
we began to gather students from Schroeder, College of Business, McCormick, and Stevenson.
We had a very diverse group and we began asking questions. We managed to gather around 20
highly engaged respondents and around 30 casual respondents and these were the results.
We asked several questions but the ones that gave us the best insights were these three. How do
you receive your news? What news are you looking for? What would it take for you to pick up a
physical copy of The Vidette? Now, most student receive and read their news through social
media, like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or phone alerts from their apple or android phones.
From the students we interviewed, many knew of the Vidette, however many did not actually
read the Vidette. It seems as if many students aren’t reading for leisure or to be informed, this
issue is not just limited to the Vidette, but all other media and newspaper outlets have been
rolling back their physical platform, and focusing in on a more mobile and online platform. Now
what are students looking for in their news? For the students who do want to be informed they
are looking for news about current politics, local, state and government. They want to stay
informed with policies that directly affect them in the short and long term. They also want to
know about all events going on at ISU on any given day or week. There is so much going on at
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ISU it would be extremely difficult to keep up, we think there should be a direct link between the
Vidette and all RSO’s so they can keep everyone informed. Another side note they said would be
interesting if they highlight regular students weekly or whenever the Vidette is published to
promote school spirit and unity. It would make students selected feel special and be happy to be
a redbird. It feels like the campus only get excited for team sports and the paper focus on that
aspect of school and not the rest of average-joe students. Now our final question we saw value in
was, what would it take for you as a student to pick up a the Vidette. Our responses were varied
but these two was the most frequent: content and coupons. Students LOVE coupons, so when
they reach for a Vidette they want to see what the can get that’s free or discounted. Now the
Vidette isn’t a coupon book, which is why content is important, the students who didn’t just pick
up the Vidette for coupons, want to be informed with information unique to the campus. They
want to read things you won’t find in the google search bar. Lastly when we were doing our
casual interviews, a few people mentioned an interesting point that we thought was worth noting
in our research. The students want diversity in the Vidette offices, this came from students and
current Vidette workers that said they feel this is an issue that should be resolved and it would
definitely make great impact to the paper. They feel as if the Vidette doesn’t have much diversity
throughout it staff. We aren’t too sure how true this is because we aren’t familiar with the staff,
Quantitative Research
Quantitative method
For our project we created an online survey that was distributed to different RSOs and
residents of Cardinal Court. This would be considered a convenience survey because it was sent
to organizations that our groups members were a part of. We received 41 responses and gathered
Findings
We found that, when ranking different types of articles that could be reported on in the
newspaper according to importance, people were most interested in reading about entertainment.
Entertainment was closely followed by Current National Events. The average response for
Entertainment was 4, and the average for Current National Events were 3.98. People were least
interested in Politics, which averaged a response of 2.8. These rankings were on a scale from one
to 5, one being least interested and 5 being most interested. These results are shown in a Graph 1
at the end of this section. We also found that 82% of those surveyed most frequently receive their
news through Social Media. The results of this are shown in Graph 2 at the end of this section.
However, with most people receiving their news through social media, only 14.6% of our
respondents actually follow the Vidette on Social Media. However, 81.6% of people said they
would follow them if they offered promotions and giveaways. We also found that 44.1% of
people have heard of the Vidette through social interactions either with friends or through word
of mouth. Another significant way they know about the Vidette is by seeing it around campus
either through posters, Festival ISU, or seeing newspaper or newspaper stands. About 29.4% of
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our respondents have found out about the Vidette through these ways. These results can be seen
Implications/Recommendations to Management
Looking at our results for the survey we can see that there is a clear problem with the
Vidette’s presence on social media and the importance of the web with this generation. While
this could seem to be a clear indication of where the Vidette needs to improve, our responses also
show us that the most common ways that students hear about the Vidette is through real life
interactions, such as their friends, professors or at festival ISU. Another interesting statistic from
our survey responses implies that more people would follow the Vidette on social media if they
did promotions or giveaways. With that being said, the best recommendations we could make is
that the Vidette needs to increase their activity on the web while also using physical methods to
make their social media accounts more well known. Lastly, using the results, the best advice we
can give on helping out the social media account is to focus more of the funds on promotions and
Graph 1
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Graph 2
Graph 3
Graph 4
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Graph 5
Conclusion
The Vidette came to us with a problem at the beginning of the semester, and throughout
the course of the semester we have found some answers to the large number of questions they
had. The Vidette is currently experiencing a brand recognition problem. Through our market
research we were able to come up with some answers for the Vidette. With our findings, we
found out that many students knew of the Vidette but never actually physically grabbed the
newspaper nor followed it on their social media. One major thing that can help the Vidette grow
their social media presence is by having contests on all of their social media platforms. Overall
this will increase the number of followers that they have, and their presence on social media
Hopefully the market research that we have conducted throughout this semester will have an
impact on the Vidette, and assist them in solving their brand recognition problem.
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Appendix
Survey Questions:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VKRuufXAwAIP1hoPuEw2jU3BN2YHEymhQxyxRIaL0
ek/edit?usp=sharing