Capstone Project

For my Capstone project, a team and I worked with a program at Washington State University called Carson Business Solutions. This program offers Washington State Businesses an opportunity to get free marketing services from seniors in the Carson College of Business. Industry Professionals also volunteer as mentors for each group, and we all work together in conjunct with our professor to come up with marketing solutions for the business.

A team member and I led our group in weekly meetings with a food delivery startup called Nomfe. We took turns creating agendas for each meeting and leading them, as well as assigning duties to the rest of the members such as taking notes. The

project was divided into 3 stages, with a lengthy presentation at the end of every stage with our professor, mentor, and the founders of Nomfe.

1st stage: We worked through their business model and value propositions to get a better understanding of their goals and what they can work on.

2nd stage: We came up with 5 recommendations for them to market and/or improve their business model.

3rd stage: We created our final implementation report with 3 of the recommendations we identified to be the most profitable to their business. To do this, we worked with ROIs.

Our final implementation report is confidential and cannot be shared due to sensitive information, but I have included some examples of the work we did in this project below. One thing I personally took charge of were the customer profiles. We identified 3 segments for Nomfe to market towards, and identified value propositions for each. From this, I created the customer profiles which ultimately helped us get a better understanding of each segment.

I also included the PowerPoint we used for our final presentation to give a better look into our project. Though it does not go in the detail that our report goes into, it includes all the necessary information to understand how we made our decisions. This was the first project I worked on with ROIs and I learned a lot.

Now that I have real-life, professional marketing experience, I would definitely change some of the work we did during our project. Nomfe had a goal to be sustainable and I wish we would have looked into a "Give Back" program where they give back to climate change/sustainability efforts for every meal that is purchased. I also would have suggested for them to outsource their digital marketing, as it is unrealistic for them to hire a full-time marketing person as a startup, but also unrealistic to do all the marketing themselves. I am happy with the work we did with the knowledge we had, and this was a pivotal project for me to better understand the process of coming up with marketing solutions.