Undergraduate Blog / Career Development

Thank You Excel

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I was focusing mainly on improving our brand image for this portion of my internship.  We knew people were buying the clothes (Saks Fifth Avenue had tripled their purchase order this time around), so obviously the customers loved our stuff, but they weren’t contributing to our good press as much as we wanted them to be.  We wanted to gather a group of customers we knew personally to go to different online stores that carry our products and have them create accounts and write reviews.  This however, required a bit of research beforehand, which is where I came in.  I created a very polished and organized excel sheet, containing critical information to this project, with every online store we sell to (I have attached a screen shot).  The data included things such as whether or not the site had the option to leave reviews, how many of our products they carried if any at all (some, like the big department stores, only carried in store), and if not reviews, then what types of sharing they included for customer to customer interaction.  It was a rather tedious job, but certainly made things much more efficient for my supervisor.  In the end I found that there were very few stores that had the option for customer reviews and that most had advanced to using social media in its place.  Pinning the product on Pinterest, or sharing it via Facebook and Twitter was the new comments box, so I thought to create a strategy around this.  I figured customers need an incentive to do just about anything, so if we offered them free shipping (because who likes to waste ten bucks on that) in exchange for a pin or a tweet of our product, then this could be much more efficient (and essentially free) good press for RVN.