Hello, I am writing to you from The Hague today as I flew out here on Sunday to take part in the International Marketing week programme at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. This blog post will be short this week, but I wanted to write about my experiences so far. I applied for this week in October last year and can’t believe how quickly it has come around. I am still in The Hague, however, I wanted to get a blog post up to speak about my experience so far, so I hope you enjoy!
There are 4 of us representing Solent University, two from my course (Public Relations and Communications Management) and two girls from the Business Management course. We met up before we came to The Hague so that we were familiar with each other and felt more confident meeting others when we arrived. There are around 30 students from 5 Universities across Europe here, with many speaking multiple languages. Whilst this is amazing, so we can communicate with them it has made each of us from the UK feel like we should have made more of an effort in school when we had language lessons.
The start of the week was focused around getting to know each other through fun social activities such as drinks in The Hague and Amsterdam, meals together and group working activities. On day 3, we were sorted into groups and begun to prepare our work for our final assessment. The purpose of the week is to work together to create a marketing campaign for Damrak Gin to launch in a new market. For my group, the market was Brazil. After attending the World of Bols experience in Amsterdam we had some inspiration by trying the Gin, and then got started on the planning process.
We wanted to create a fun campaign targeted at the free, young, partygoers which Damrak targets in Europe. There were some communication issues as for some members of my group, English was their third or fourth language however, this was something which Google Translate could solve! Once the marketing campaign was created, we had to make an advert and a new cocktail which could help with our launch. We decided to keep the content clean, with the staple colours of orange and blue to fit in with the Damrak branding but also appealing to the Brazilian market. We also had to make a cocktail featuring the gin and chose to create a fusion of Amsterdam and Brazil in a glass to offer the Amsterdam experience which Damrak Gin delivers.
So far, it has been amazing working in a group with international students. We have all learnt so much from each other. Especially how to target new markets or use language to communicate more clearly. We have our final presentation tomorrow, so be sure to come back to read my blog next week for a summary of all of the work which students created.