Dr. James A Mead

The U Choose awards is a student-led marketing research, branding, and community engagement project. This project is designed to provide students with a range of opportunities to apply and demonstrate marketing knowledge while engaging with the local business community. Under the guidance of a faculty advisor, students are tasked with developing and distributing a survey to assess the consumer-based brand equity of local businesses and organizations, branding their project, and presenting the winning businesses/organizations of each category with an award recognizing their accomplishment. We created the U Choose Awards as an activity for the student chapter of the AMA (course-based adaptations also discussed). We saw this as an alternative to live cases, which can be unreliable in delivering marketing knowledge to students because live cases can vary so much in the quality of the experience.