Selling Smith

How does one turn an undergraduate-operated school store shrouded in obscurity into a viable, competitive business? By utilizing the resources available at the Smith School's Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship and tapping into the wealth of real-world marketing experience of Associate Professor of Marketing Wendy Moe, of course!

Tucked away in a third-floor office in Van Munching Hall, the Smith Store has mostly catered to Smith School departments, providing gifts for visiting speakers as needed, and supplying walk-in customers with t-shirts, baseball caps and other basic Smith-branded apparel. This somewhat limited reach, however, comes as no surprise to the three undergraduates behind the operations of the store – as a result of their teaming with Moe, senior Tarak Dave and juniors Michael Holzheimer and Jeff Berenholtz were not allowed to do any form of marketing over the past year. This period of marketing inactivity is to serve as the control for a series of secretive marketing experiments planned for the next year of business.

Moe’s partnership with the Smith Store is a mutually beneficial one – while the employees benefit from her knowledge and well-laid plans for the store’s success, she will be able to collect valuable data from the store’s Web site for her own research. Clickstream data, as it is known, tracks how long a user has spent on a Web site, and on which specific pages – invaluable information to the tech-savvy marketing researcher. This data will also help dictate marketing strategies and continuing experiments for the Smith Store, all of which are being kept tightly under wraps, so as not to sully the resulting data by making consumers aware of the tactics.

Not quite so secretly, however, the Smith Store has made itself more available to its existing clientele of faculty and staff, by handily adding the ability to bill costs directly to a department’s account. In an effort to reach the undergraduate student population, a kiosk with a wide selection of merchandise will now be located on the first floor of Van Munching Hall throughout the spring semester. The improved Web site hopes to cater more to the largely untapped group of Smith alumni, who Moe sees as the demographic with the most potential to buy. The store has also expanded its merchandise selection, now including such products as hooded sweatshirts, car decals, coasters, "Thank You" stationery, and sporty water bottles.

While Moe has called her side of the ongoing project thus far a “learning experience,” she describes the Smith Store employees as “very motivated and creative,” and looks forward to working through this pilot year of data collection. The students feel the same way, as Holzheimer admits the process has been fun, but stressful. And have their efforts thus far been worthwhile? Stop by their office in VMH 3570U to see for yourself, or visit the revamped Web site at www.thesmithstore.com today.

▓ Amy Taylor, Office of Marketing Communications