Olsen, M, Week 1

Hi, welcome to my first blog! My name is Marissa Olsen and I am from Long Island. I am currently a junior at Elmira College in the class of 2019. I am a Business Administration major with a concentration in Marketing.  I am also on the Nationally Ranked Competitive Cheerleading Team here at Elmira College. I am a Branch Office Administrator at Edward Jones, a financial consult corporation, and the Social Media Coordinator for the Elmira College Cheerleading team.

This term 3 I am taking a class called, "Entertainment, Media, and Sports Marketing: An Experiential Learning Experience." Within this course, we will be learning about all aspects of marketing within the entertainment, art, media, and sports world. Throughout the extent of this class, I will be posting weekly blogs about what we have done in our class including our field trips, discussions and experiences.

This week we had two guest speakers and a field trip. The first guest speaker that we had was Dr. Matthew Hufnagel, who is a serial entrepreneur. He owns 4 subways, 4 commercial buildings, Clean and Green; a carpet cleaning business, a promotion business, apartment buildings, teaches classes online and at Corning Community College, ran a minor league hockey and baseball team, and has put on 47 shows all over the country in 9 weeks. His presentation to us was very powerful in my opinion just because he isn't afraid to risk it all which I find to be very admirable when it comes to doing what you love in life, which he is!

"You don’t need money to make money. It’s just excuses and a lack of confidence." - Dr. Hufnagel

The second guest speaker we had was Professor John Kelly, who spoke to us about marketing the theater and arts. Within Professor Kelly’s presentation he spoke about how when marketing the theater, you must do market research in order to know what crowds are around you and who/how to market the upcoming productions. There is a lot of research that must be done in order to calculate ticket prices based off of income, complication of the performance if not an educated area, age, gender, race, and if there are any large corporations around that would want to buy tickets for their employees. He also said that word of mouth is extremely important so that the show will be spoken about and spread around.

“Opening night needs to be really good, so people tell their friends about it and then more people will come. Or if it’s really bad tell your enemies!” - Professor John Kelly

To wrap up our week, on Friday, we had the opportunity to have a tour of the Clemens Center by Karen Cromer, who is the Executive Director of the Clemens Center. Karen went over some of the ins and outs of marketing the theater and how difficult it can be to market the plays to the surrounding areas and to the targeted audiences. 

Image Credit: Myself