My apologies for not posting anything lately. Life at Purdue has kept me busy indeed and I am counting the days to spring break to get a breather and recharge my batteries. On a personal note, I just want to scream when some politician wants to villify the service we provide to this society but that is a rant for another day.
On a positive note. Many of you may have a foodservice operation that is run by students under watchful eye of a professional staff. We have two operations that we run out of our department at Purdue. Because we are not recognized as an official "lab" like those in physics or biology on this campus we have to be self-supporting so customers literally keep us in the teaching business with their patronage.
So to generate much needed revenues we recently decided to formally tie my sales class to promoting our Cafe operation which has been the tried and true institutional cafe line when first installed years ago. Believe it or not we could depend on people lining up out the door for comfort food off the line and revenues were plentiful for a very long time. Not anymore! People are eathing healthier these days and while we offer meatloaf we also have vegetarian sandwiches and sides on the line.
So the ten teams in the sales class each get a week to blitz the building of their choice and manage the Facebook page to promote sales in the Cafe applying what we learn in the sales class. The blog is not intended for a long winded explanation but let me tell you that this project has exceeded my wildest expectations. The creativity and work that the students have put into their week has been unbelievable.
Best of all for students -- we can track sales in the Cafe and compare each team's week to same time last year to see if their sales efforts are paying off. And it appears that they are as business is really starting to pick up now that more know what we have refreshed our menu offerings and increase consumer awareness on campus for Cafe (which we are also not allowed to promote with any signage). During their week, each team gets the chance to stand before their peers and explain what they did to promote sales and what they are learning about sales. As each week goes by the team in charge sets the bar higher for the team that will follow so the salesmanship gets better, too. For example, the team taking over after we get from break is going to do a documentary on how the students make pizza and post taht to Facebook -- which is awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This is just one of those assignments that does not have a key course objective and slew of learning objectives to teach and assess it; the students are simply free to experiment with sales blitz techniques (which they were taught and practiced at the Indianapolis Hilton) and Facebook -- which they know quite well and learning whether or not it is a viable sales tool as claimed by many businesses. So if you have a chance check out the Facebook page for HTM Cafe Promotions at:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/HTM-Cafe-Promotions/119760051428827
No comments:
Post a Comment