DWC Students Doing Real World Marketing for Manchester’s XMA

Local company reaps benefits from student marketing consultant team

(Nashua, NH) — XMA Corporation is a young, Manchester, NH-based company that provides proven radio frequency and microwave products to a diverse business customer base, including military/aerospace companies, suppliers of wireless and wired communications systems, test and measurement equipment manufacturers, and the commercial broadcast industry. It ranks many Fortune 500 companies among its customers.

Nashua’s Daniel Webster College, with its focus on hands-on, experiential education in specific professional fields, provides its students with “real world” activities that cannot be replicated in the classroom, giving those students a “leg up” on other college graduates whose résumés do not include ‘marketing consultant.’

So when XMA Vice President and General Manager Dave Crocker sought to bring in a collegiate marketing group to augment his management’s technically-oriented team and broaden the experiential education of local college students, he selected an energized, enthusiastic team comprised of upper-class marketing majors at Daniel Webster to conduct research, evaluate the competition, and make marketing strategy recommendations.

“After initially contacting 15 New Hampshire colleges offering business and/or marketing degrees, Daniel Webster was one of three colleges that expressed interest in developing a new marketing course that gave students a broader and deeper involvement with real-world business challenges,” said Crocker.

“During follow-up phone discussions with Daniel Webster’s Professor Neil Parmenter, the college’s strong focus on experiential education as a key ingredient to a well-rounded education, coupled with an open-minded flexibility towards forming new, creative partnerships with industry made Daniel Webster College the obvious choice.”

Although it was only one semester, noted Crocker, the Daniel Webster students accomplished a lot in a short period of time. They:

Formed a marketing consulting company, Eagle Marketing Consulting.
Developed and presented a marketing plan for XMA Corporation.
Working with XMA, the group designed a 4-color advertisement that focused on brand recognition and company differentiation. The ad is currently running in two radio frequency and microwave industry publications.
Proposed a new Web site concept and implemented an interim Web site upgrade.
Critiqued the current new product release program and prepared enhanced press release formats.

“This is a unique partnering,” said Professor Parmenter, “where our students couldn’t get a better understanding of real world business practices.”

“The opportunity to work with XMA gave me the opportunity to apply the skills and techniques I'd learned in the marketing program at Daniel Webster and apply them in a real business,” said Joseph Tingley, a Daniel Webster senior. “In turn, I learned not only the theoretical aspects of the subject material, but their direct application in the industry. I think this hands-on approach to education is what sets Daniel Webster apart from other schools.”

For XMA, the DWC marketing consultants augments a lean organization without its own in-house marketing group. XMA also benefits from a relationship with a prestigious small, private college.

“This successful first step towards a much broader teaming relationship between XMA Corporation and Daniel Webster College provides powerful evidence of one way to achieve the next generation of experiential educational opportunities for tomorrow’s business leaders, while at the same time enhancing the productivity of US businesses,” said Crocker.

For the upper level marketing course, 50 percent of the time is spent on classroom work, while 50 percent is spent working on the consultancy. It’s not an internship, where a student is away from a college and faculty for a semester; neither is it a classroom activity that attempts to capture the real world. The student consultants are working for a real client with guidance from Daniel Webster faculty.

And work they did, spending hours of their own time working in three groups to research, plan, and execute that plan to meet the challenges that XMA faced.

Said junior Erin Moseley, “Functioning as a real company, we learned the demands you will be faced with in the "real world," and how meeting the need of the customer is most important.”

“Although we were young and inexperienced, we approached the task head-on. Originally asked to only propose a marketing plan, we became so involved with it all that we ended up following through with its implementation even after the semester ended.”

Daniel Webster benefits from relationships like that of XMA, strengthening its community relationships and outreach to the business community and keeping abreast of current business and industry trends. Additionally, providing a student consultant team to real businesses enhances its overall programs and how the college is perceived by those in the community, as well as to those considering the college for their undergraduate or graduate work.

Daniel Webster College, founded in 1965, educates men and women for professional entry and advanced studies in the fields of business and management, aviation, computer science, social science and engineering. For more information about the business and management division, including its undergraduate and MBA programs, visit www.dwc.edu or call 603-577-6000.