Professor Aron Darmody is an Associate Professor of Marketing with the Sprott School of Business here at Carleton University. With a PhD in Marketing from York University, a master’s degree in marketing from Dublin City University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Commerce from University College Cork, Professor Darmody has an abundance of knowledge and experience in the world of marketing. At the Innovation Hub, all of our program participants are informed on the importance of marketing, creativity, and the ability to sell their business or product.
Arriving at Carleton around the same time that the Innovation Hub started up, Professor Darmody quickly heard about the new organization on campus and saw an opportunity for a partnership and a chance for his students to participate in experiential learning. In recent years, experiential learning has become more common in educational situations – for both schools and employers. Experiential learning is the process of gaining knowledge and skills through direct, hands-on experience rather than through traditional classroom instruction. Carleton University promotes experiential learning throughout all of its faculties as it has countless educational benefits.
In the fall 2022 and winter 2023 semesters of the school year, Aron Darmody and Carleton University’s Innovation Hub organized a partnership between the BUSI3205 Marketing Communications students and Innovation Hub student founders. Students from Darmody’s class got involved in a semester-long group project, where students were divided into teams that acted as marketing agencies and were assigned to one of three clients that came directly from the Innovation Hub. Each student team were designed to have a balanced blend of skills, experiences, and interests and students took on roles that included account manager, creative director, social media coordinator, media planner, and more.
Over the course of the winter semester, students developed a comprehensive marketing communications plan for their client. Through this experiential learning opportunity, students were able to accumulate marketing and communications knowledge while applying it to real-world situations with clients and their businesses that came directly from the Hub. This collaborative partnership gave marketing students the chance to put their academic knowledge into creating something tangible, while the clients (student founders) benefitted from new ways of thinking. Some of the businesses involved in this project included:
- A self-watering garden box
- A local business promotion app
- A digital contraceptive counseling tool
- An indigenous film festival
Student-run businesses face many challenges and even Innovation Hub student founders work with limited marketing budgets. Marketing communications is an integral part of marketing and the BUSI3205 students came up with countless creative and impactful strategies that recognized the realities of the business they were working with. Some of the strategies included: engaging social media strategies, in-depth customer analysis, and the use of artwork to start trends. Creativity is key when it comes to business, and this lesson proved valuable for the BUSI3205 students and Hub founders who received a fist-hand account of what it takes to run a wide variety of start-ups and tailored marketing campaigns over the course of the semester.
Both the Innovation Hub and Professor Darmody look forward to continuing this collaboration in future years and hope other professors and faculties follow suit!
