Digital Retailing for Moms and Kids
Fashion and technology met at Bocconi in the context of "The Future of Digital Retailing in the Projects of Bocconi Students", which is part of curriculum of the Master of Science in Marketing Management, in collaboration with Fabrica, the creative arm of the Benetton Group and the Future Center of Telecom Italia.
Twelve teams of five students competed in detailing an e-marketing strategy to help a company (in this case Benetton) improve its relations with customers and sezine new market targets by using digital media (web, cell phone, digital TV). All in the most crreative way and achievable in practice at sustainable costs.
The winner was Project #11 composed by Claudio Chinnici, Federico Cucinelli, Giorgia Matteazzi, Valentina Rossetti and Kesen Zeng, who focused on a particular profile of Benetton's consumers, mothers with small children.
"We realized by empirical and qualitative investigation that the bonding between Benetton and its consumers is born at a very early age, so we worked on creating a relation with the brand", Valentina Rossetti explains, "which accompanies the child during her/his development". Students visited downtown Benetton's shops to monitor the behaviors of mothers and children and submitted an online questionnaire on mothers and computers under the auspices of the Benetton brand.
"Mothers with children was not an easy target for us," Claudio Chinnici explains, "we had to go the extra mile. It would have been easier working on a target of our peers." At the end of the data-gathering phase, the team built a web site "focusing on four themes (games, community, charity, outlet) where the interests of mothers and children could converge," the winning team explains. "On the site there is the possibility of giving your second-hand clothes to charity and we built a facebook account where clothes can be tagged. The games we have developed educate kids to the use of the Internet".
"It's a very original project", says Margherita Pagani, who teaches Advance Topics in E-Marketing and E-Commerce and helped with the project, "overall for the target in question and the originality and coherence in using new digital media to orient it effectively. This was the main reason the project was awarded".
Is there the possibility that Benetton actually adopts it? "Nobody told us anything in this respect," the students say. "But an important aspect of our project is its concreteness and feasibility. Fabrica is a lab of ideas, which takes in stimuli and creative inputs. We hope we gave them something to work on."
The presentation of the six most interesting project wsas done Monday February 15 in Bocconi, in the presence of Antonella Carù, Director of the Master of Science in Marketing Management, Margherita Pagani, Roberto Saracco, Director of the Future Center of Telecom Italia, Andy Cameron, Executive Director of Fabrica, and Guido Corbetta, Dean of the Bocconi Graduate school.
"This course is fundamentally based on a strong integration between in-class and in-company experience," says Antonella Carù. "Students will understand the importance of teamwork once they have taken their first jobs. But also firms get the opportunity of concretely discussing with young people issue of relevance for their present and future".
"Issues at the frontier of marketing", as Margherita Pagani defines them, "are usually those that the companies we work with have to face," she goes on to explain. "Our classes are multicultural and the active exchange of ideas is encouraged and stimulated."