Last summer I came into my MBA having done marketing at exactly one organization, as Marketing Manager at UNMC Engage Wellness. That summer was books, coffee chats, and figuring it out as I went.
This summer, I wanted to put a year of coursework against real problems in more than one kind of business. So I took three internships at once instead of one. Brand and consulting at Benevolent Creative. Product marketing at Chaseburg Manufacturing. Marketing analytics at UWEBC.
Benevolent Creative: Brand Marketing & Consulting
Benevolent is a young agency, which means you touch everything. In a given week I’d be building a competitive analysis, sizing a revenue model, and organizing a pitch strategy.
The project I keep returning to is the one where we turned the question inward: who is this agency actually for? I built a segmentation model defining three client archetypes, sorted by pain point and revenue ceiling rather than by industry. That analysis shaped how we pursued new business and contributed to a client relationship that grew monthly revenue by ten percent.
I also had a mentor, Rachel, who gave me real work from the first week and let me be wrong in front of her. That matters more than any single project. Most of what I learned this summer, I learned because someone made room for me to learn it.
Chaseburg Manufacturing: Product Marketing
Chaseburg has made the same product for forty years and sold it almost entirely through distributors. We’re launching a consumer version into a market where the brand has no equity yet.
My deliverable was the soft launch strategy for early next year: who we’re targeting, how we show up, which channels we test first, and what we’d need to see before scaling. Building a launch plan for a product with no track record is a different exercise than optimizing one that already exists. You’re deciding what to find out, in what order, before you’ve spent anything.
UW E-Business Consortium (UWEBC): Marketing Analytics
At UWEBC I rebuilt the approach to our annual conference campaign. Rather than start from last year’s calendar, I went into four years of data across all of their programming to understand how member companies actually engage over time.
What came out of it was a much clearer picture of attendance behavior, and a segmented campaign framework built on that pattern instead of on a schedule. I also built the tracker so the team can keep measuring it after I’m gone.
Three Things That Changed in How I Work
Segment before you spend. Every one of these three was solvable with better targeting, not a bigger budget. That was true at an agency, a manufacturer, and a member organization, which was the part that surprised me.
Sequence by precondition. Ask what has to be true first, not which channel sounds exciting. Most campaign plans I used to write started with tactics. Now they start with order.
Build for the inheritor. A framework nobody adopts after you leave didn’t actually ship. I used to measure my work by whether it was good. I measure it now by whether it survives me.
I came into this summer thinking I’d pick up three separate skill sets. What I actually got was a much better sense of what marketing is underneath the job titles.
Going into my second and final year at the Wisconsin School of Business, that’s what I’m carrying with me. Thank you to Rachel and the Benevolent Creative team, to everyone at Chaseburg, and to Taryn Johnson and the team at UWEBC for letting me learn on real work.
On, Wisconsin!
