INDUSTRY CONNECTIONS: Stone Boutique Partners with Campaigns Students

Stone Boutique is a Dallas-based fine and rare stone showroom that brings cutting-edge slab technology to the interior design consumer. Owners Francisco and Margarita Acosta are dedicated to disrupting the industry by leveraging their patented technology to pioneer a new start-to-finish purchasing experience. They explain:

“For us, discovering a once-in-a-lifetime slab is a magical experience. Over the course of our first 30 years in the industry, we watched in awe as pieces forged by the history of the world’s most intriguing places were unearthed, only to be delivered to the customer through a lifeless, inefficient, and frustrating processes. It wasn’t good enough for the customer or for us.”

The Acosta’s aspire to increase sales, expand offerings globally, and roll out a proprietary process to revolutionize the consumer journey. They have partnered this fall with Professor Peter Noble’s campaigns course seeking a complete integrated marketing and messaging strategy to achieve this goal. “We partnered with Stone Boutique for two reasons. First, they provide our senior advertising students with an unusual challenge — their business spans both business-to-business and business-to-consumer product categories. And second, with their proprietary technology Stone Boutique has the potential to rapidly grow from a relatively recent start-up into a leading global brand. They’re poised to disrupt the entire stone industry. At this stage in their brand development, Stone Boutique was interested in raising and enhancing awareness of their revolutionary stone selection process,” Noble explains. Temerlin students are eagerly working on the campaign; two teams will present a plans book and virtual presentation to the client early next month.

Our students greatly benefit from working with real-world class clients such as Stone Boutique.

INDUSTRY CONNECTIONS: Campaigns Class Lands Global Orthodontics Client

This fall, Professor Peter Noble’s undergraduate campaigns course partnered with the world’s largest manufacturer of professional dental products and technologies, Dentsply Sirona, for a unique B2B marketing challenge. In three teams, the students conducted three individual market analyses and audience surveys to conclude their capstone project with a fully developed marketing plan for how to increase visibility and drive attendance to the SureSmile multi-day education event. The winning team, Agency Incite, traveled to SureSmile 2020 in San Diego at the end of February to make their pitch live on stage.

“The submitted concepts provide valuable insights about our industry and user base. As creative strategies, they offer usable models, for example, to leverage user feedback or behavior or point out emerging trends and opportunities. For our company, this partnership returned significant assets in creative, research, and strategy,” said Dominique Mondou, Vice President Traditional and Digital Orthodontics.

Click here to learn more about campaign clients or contact Sandi Edgar for more information.

SMU Students Provide Marketing Plan for Amy Kate Gardens

Five Temerlin Advertising Institute students created a marketing plan in their Integrated Marketing Communications course that their class client, Amy Kate Gardens, is implementing into their current business plan. The students, Mira Suarsana, Belle Riley, Briana O’Connor, Adella Winder and Leigh Groeschell, were under the direction of Associate Professor Yongjun Sung.

During the Fall semester, five groups of students in the Integrated  Marketing  Communications Class created a marketing plan for Amy Kate Gardens, a Southlake – based  company that helps individuals create personalized miniature gardens and at home parties.

Amy Kate brought in a panel of industry professionals to judge the groups’ presentations and choose a winner. “The winning team was a truly impressive group. They came up with a number of recommendations for Amy Kate. In fact, many of their ideas were immediately incorporated into Amy Kate’s planning,” reports Dr. Sung. “For example, based on their suggestion, Amy Kate did purchase D Mom Magazine for its first advertising this spring. Also, Amy Kate changed its brand positioning based on our students’ analysis. Per their request, Amy Kate hired a professional PR firm to implement their suggestions.”

“We were so impressed with the creativity and depth of knowledge that the SMU  Communications students brought to the project,“ says Bill Chinn,  an SMU Executive MBA  graduate, who owns Amy Kate Gardens.

For more information about Amy Kate Gardens, visit www.amykategardens.com

SMU-Market-Team-WinnerTeam picture used in their campaign presentation.