My name is Orhan Eldarov and I am a second year student at the Sauder School of Business. When I was younger, in my head the word marketing and advertising meant the same thing. It was not until I’ve had a chance to do some marketing myself when I realized that it’s so much more. In my first year at UBC I got to participate in some marketing campaigns for various philanthropy and social events on behalf of my fraternity. I realized that marketing is not just all about advertising. It’s about developing a relationship with your target audience in order to develop their loyalty. In my case, we had to market our events in a way that would make the students want to come back again and again. In order to achieve that goal we decided to take an interactive marketing approach to involve the students and get them excited about our events. For example, for one of our themed parties, we created a little competition for whoever posts a 90’s song with the most ‘likes’ on our event page on Facebook. We ended up having over 100 submissions within several days and over 700 people ended up attending the party. It was very cool to read about the exact same concept in the textbook! This made me really look forward to the rest of the course because I realized how useful and applicable it is to real life. I can’t wait to try out all the new marketing concepts I learned about to my own marketing endeavors.

– O