By: Aly West

Looking out into the stands, often little to no students show up to watch and support their friends at sports events outside than football and basketball. This is what led to Josh Craig, a business teacher at Bellbrook High School, to work towards increasing student attendance at games with his marketing class. 

During the course, students do research towards a marketing report to develop a marketing plan based on a given problem. It was important to Craig that this problem was relevant to the students and engaging enough for the whole semester. 

“We also knew that utilizing Mr. O’Dell’s kindness and willingness to help students was only going to help us implement these ideas even further,” said Craig.

After learning about the marketing process, students were then assigned groups to decide how they want to collect data, whether it was focus groups or Google forms. The student body was asked why they don’t attend sports games or why some games attract more students than others.

Olive Varvel, a junior at Bellbrook High School in the marketing class, utilized a focus group during the research process. 

“There were two main focus groups. One was a group of sophomores and the other was a mix of grades. In that, they were able to bounce ideas off of each other and share their thoughts,” Varvel said. “For example, they were able to say they wanted to see more food trucks at the games.”

Brayden Westbeld, a senior at Bellbrook High School in the marketing class, explored different ideas to improve attendance. 

“We thought taking more action in broadening announcements over speakers, the school TVs, and word of mouth through teachers would be the most beneficial,” Westbeld said. “Also, we thought of improving social media, making use of school spirit buses, and in person events similar to Chick-Fil-A.”

Varvel and Westbeld both faced challenges in their groups while creating their marketing report. 

“It was really hard to look back on our mistakes and realize that we couldn’t change them,” Varvel said. “We had to work off of what we got from the surveys, even if the data wasn’t completely accurate.”

“Finding and looking for solutions to the problems was the most complicated part of the process because obviously we already knew that people weren’t really showing up,” Westbeld said. “So, we really had to be careful with what questions we were asking.”

The students in each group were able to present their ideas in front of the class, as well as a few of the administrators and staff. 

“Each group really did have something unique that I thought they brought. When you start pulling and taking an idea from ear to ear, then you’ve got some really great things you can put together,” Henry Conte, the parent/community engagement and communications coordinator for Bellbrook Sugarcreek Schools, said. “I think almost everybody mentioned food, so that’s clearly going to be something Mr. O’Dell takes into consideration.”

“A lot of the key stakeholders really liked the idea of a club versus a club idea at games to increase student involvement and competition,” Craig said. “Also the idea of doing shorter reels with the Nest, but more game or player highlights. Especially since males are more interested in the game and females are more interested in the social aspect.”

Heading into the next quarter, the students will get to learn more about the creative side of marketing, gain hands-on experience, and hear from guest speakers, including Marissa Cordray, FC Cincinnati Marketing Coordinator on October 30, and Alyssa Pernush, intern with UD Athletics Social Media Team on November 17. 

At the end of the semester, students are set with a basic knowledge of marketing skills that adequately prepares them for their career, as marketing is still changing daily. Especially since Chat GPT will play its role in the field in a few years. 

“We are using AI to help us formulate the Google Form questions to reduce bias and give the best wording. Then after receiving the responses from students, we asked Chat GPT to find the five most recurring themes,” Craig said. “We’re trying to learn how we can use AI to be more efficient and analyze data better, not demonize it.”

“This class also implements soft and public speaking skills, which it’s definitely transcending in any career and so invaluable,” Craig said. “Especially data analysis; it’s such a big deal now. We can take what the students said and make it into an actionable sense of data.”