Get help to understand your customers
Our postgraduate marketing students can bring your business new data-driven ideas and customer insights
Would your business like some free advice to help you understand your customers better and improve your marketing?
Our postgraduate Digital Marketing, International Marketing, and Marketing Analytics students need real businesses to work with to help them learn. Through this project your business can benefit from their knowledge and experience to get data-driven suggestions to improve your marketing – at no cost to your business.
Our students can help your business to:
- better understand what your customers think of your product or service
- better understand what your customers think of your competitors
- learn more about your customers, which allows you to create more targeted marketing
How this consumer research project works
- To take part in this project you can be a business of any size, in the private or public sector
- You'll need to submit a consumer research brief to us
- The tutor will work with you to agree the research brief to ensure it can be achieved with the time, resources and capabilities of the students available, whilst ensuring that the project outputs are valuable for your business
- The students will work together in teams of 4 to 5 people, drawn from our MA Digital Marketing, MA International Marketing, and MA Marketing Analytics degrees
- The students will work with you to design a consumer research plan (proposal) for your approval. They'll then work on this research from February to May and provide a tailored debrief presentation and report at the end
- The student teams will be supported by a tutor who has extensive global experience working with clients across many business sectors
Please note:
The tutor assigns students to briefs. We may need to decline some briefs. If there are too many requests, then the tutor will choose based on the suitability for the students to be able to add most value to the business.
How much work is involved
We recommend that you spend around one hour a week helping your student team. This is an average and time commitment may vary throughout the project.
You'll need to:
- introduce your student team to the staff members they'll work with and provide them with any additional resources and contacts they need
- make time to respond to queries from the team
- meet with them (in-person or online) once a fortnight for an update on the project and to agree next steps
- attend the team's end-of-project presentation to give feedback on their final recommendations. You're not required to formally mark this presentation, but your feedback as a client will be gladly accepted. You can invite any other interested parties to this presentation.
For many students, this is the first time they will have taken on a consulting project, so any help and advice from you in running the project is welcome. You'll have a key role in inspiring the team through sharing your own experiences and any suggestions as to how the team can improve.
It's important to remember that students are expecting to learn and work as consultants, not as an extra resource to carry out day-to-day work. You should allow your student team to use their creativity to explore new avenues, including those that challenge the assumptions of the organisation and client.
Previous clients on this project
Companies that we've worked with previously on this project include:
- Montezuma's Chocolate
- The Tomato Stall
- X-Zony
- IBM
- Other World Escapes
- Bold Bean Co
- Island City Living
- Fresh Relevance
- The Sports Barista
Project timeline
- Deadline for applications: 1 December 2022
- Exploration of the brief with the course tutor: December 2022 - January 2023
- Projects assigned: Late January 2023
- Students work on project: February - May 2023
- Feedback and presentation: May 2023
Send us your project idea
If you have a consumer insights research project that you think our students could help you with please get in touch.