SUU Students Win Get Healthy Utah Marketing Competition

Published: May 09, 2019 | Author: Parker Nelson | Read Time: 3 minutes

Southern Utah University students, McKayla Heaton, Taylor Pulver, Naomi Beatty, and Kylee Wharton were recently announced as the winners of a marketing competition sponsored by Get Healthy Utah. The competition was announced at a Higher Education Food Summit held last September.

Heaton and her team worked on the project for several weeks where their goal was to “develop a marketing campaign that utilized the results of the Utah Health Values Study and emphasizes the importance of fruit consumption in maintaining and improving health,” said Pulver.

Because of their great success, the students were also asked to participate in the Utah Public Health Association (UPHA) conference this April on a panel to discuss the competition. Each student on the team will be awarded a $500 cash prize.

Beatty said, “It was a team project that we all felt passionate about. When we found out we won, it was a huge cause for celebration.”

In discussing their campaign, they decided to design social media posts, a flyer/handout, and a marketing video. “We also created the hashtag #healthyhabitsutah with the intent to help people interact more on social media which gave us the ability to track its use since it is so unique,” said Pulver.

Wharton, a marketing student working on the project said about the competition, “It was a cool opportunity for everyone. We got to spread the word about something that was positive and we got to learn more about each other's disciplines.”

Along with her teammates, Beatty helped to focus their theme around the idea of being healthy for your family. Through their hashtag, #healthyhabitsutah, she said they “encouraged families to post about their own healthy habits and what they were doing together and what they were doing together to improve,” said Beatty.

Their marketing video focused on young families and ended with the quote by Joyce Meyer, “The greatest gift you can give your family and the world is a healthy you”.

The team met weekly during the fall semester and received a lot of support from Pam Branin, Sofie Scalleta, and the nutrition department. According to Beatty, “Mckayla, our fearless leader, was amazing at coordinating all our ideas and plans to create an amazing final project that really showed how we worked to each other’s strengths.”

When asked about her favorite aspect to this project, Beatty said, “The coolest part about all of this is the opportunity it shows for students at SUU: Yes, you can do more than go to class, you can combine your passion with people from other majors to create an outstanding project, and most importantly, you can count on the T-bird family to be there supporting you the whole time.”

“Getting a message across to your target audience while maintaining good aesthetic is a very strategic thing that I had never really been involved in before and even though it was difficult, I'm grateful we had the chance to become more adept at it,” Heaton said.

Heaton said, “The competition was a valuable lesson on how working as a team can be a great benefit to generate ideas and get a group project done and how to effectively create a marketing platform for a specific audience.”

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Tags: Nutrition Student Marketing Competition

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