Pala Eyewear: Marketing Collaboration Project

Hello and welcome to the microsite of our eTwinning project. This was a collaboration between HAK1 Salzburg in Austria and Perho College, Helsinki, Finland in March 2021.

Overview

The task is to produce two pieces of promotional content for your client, Pala Eyewear, a sustainable and ethical sunglasses brand:

• a social media post to be aimed at the target group in Austria and Finland
• a poster for in-store merchandising which can be used to raise the profile of the brand in stores in the two countries.

In addition to the two marketing outputs above, each group will document their work on this website and present their final output to the Pala management at a final video conference using a branded PowerPoint presentation (or similar).

Language

Of course language needs to be considered. To keep costs down, save time and reflect the international feel of the product, only an English set of marketing materials will be created. However not everybody in the target countries speaks English so keep the number of words used low! 

Organisation

Each group has seven team members (4 from Austria and 3 from Helsinki):

• one should agree to be the team coordinator. This person should be good at working with people, managing time and maintaining an overview of a project. You should be prepared to help out any of your sub-teams who need it, as well as ensuring that the sub-teams are producing content keeping to the agreed design specifications 
• two will be in charge of producing the social media post
• two will be in charge of producing the in-store poster
• two will be in charge of documenting the work of the team on this website (screenshots, photos, videos, text entries...) and of producing the final PowerPoint presentation to present the work

Collaboration technology

One of the challenges of this project (and life) is that the two schools use different and incompatible distance learning solutions. So you will need to decide how best to work together.

• Use Google apps: Probably the easiest solution for actually producing your output is to use shared Google files. You will be given links to Google Docs and Google Slides files that you can collaborate with.
• Screensharing using video conference software 
• Save working files in the "Materials" section of this website

Schedule

Week 1: 
- Introduce the task and group allocation (20 minutes). 
- Brainstorming, idea generation, task allocation (30 minutes)
- Working on the output (60 minutes)

Week 2: 
- Working on the output (80 minutes)
- Presentations (40 minutes)

You are also free to work further on the project in your own time but remember to keep communicating with your team. Don't go off on your own for hours in the wrong direction!

Where should we start?

You will find a video recorded by John Pritchard, the founder of Pala Eyewear, on the Twinboard below. In the video he tells us about a key Pala Eyewear target group and the products' positioning in the market, as well as the name of a competitor that it might be worth researching.

You should spend 15 minutes researching Pala Eyewear, its ethics (very important), corporate identity, its "look", target group, positioning, and competitors.  

Then you are ready to brainstorm ideas for your marketing output (social media post; in-store poster) which fit with brand.

When you have agreed your ideas, the two sub-teams (the social media and poster teams) should start their design work. You should make sure that there is a connection between the two outputs so stay in contact. This is the job of the group leader too. By working together with both sub-teams, the group leader should see if their work is going in different directions and try to keep them together. Not an easy task! You should make sure that the same colours, fonts, images etc. are used in both outputs.

At the same time, a sub-team is documenting what you are doing. They will want to collect screenshots, sketches, mind-maps, photos, videos... Anything that they can put onto their webpage to show how you worked on the task. For example, which fonts did you discuss? Why was the final font chosen?

This sub-team will also need to prepare your final Google Slides presentation for when you present your output to the whole group. The purpose of this presentation is to present your marketing ideas to the management at Pala: why have we chosen these images, colours, slogans,...

Time is really tight so aim for completion rather than perfection!

Don't forget to copy links to any materials you use from the Internet. Always show your sources!