High school student Max walks into the room to meet with school guidance counselor, Mr. Phillips. Friendly but frazzled, Max rattles off a list of projects and life to-dos—including he’s not even sure how to vote.
“Look, I know you’ve got a ton on your plate,” says Mr. Phillips reassuringly, clearing off his desk with a single sweep of the arm as multiple items clatter to the ground. “But with the help of the League of Women Voters”—he produces a pamphlet out of nowhere—“voting registration is one less thing to worry about.”
This exchange did not occur in your local high school, but instead was a scene filmed in an empty classroom in Grainger Hall at the Wisconsin School of Business. The short video was one of many created by WSB student teams in Assistant Professor of Marketing and Jeffrey J. Diermeier Faculty Fellow Aziza Jones’ Brand Strategy and Management class in partnership with the Milwaukee County chapter of the League of Women Voters (LWV).
The project first started in 2022 when Leigh Ann Tidey, team leader with LWV’s High School Voter Education and Registration Project, reached out to Jones for college-level students interested in motivating high school students to vote. Tidey oversees the high school student voting outreach for LWV and works in conjunction with all the high schools in the Milwaukee public school system.
While all states in the U.S. allow citizens to vote at 18 years of age, many young people face barriers to voting, including a lack of understanding of the electoral process and how to register. LWV offers creative solutions to encourage high school students to register to vote in a manner that reflects the LWV’s nonpartisan platform.
“Creating a campaign to inspire young voters that tapped into brand management students’ creativity and brand expertise aligned well with what LWV was looking for and was an excellent experience for WSB students,” says Jones.
“My students learn very well how to create a message that reflects a brand’s values. At the same time, they learn how to encourage behavior with an ethical mindset around it, and I thought this might be a great project students could lean into,” Jones says. “Leigh Ann loved the idea, and we spent the next year batting around the idea and a variety of questions. What would this project look like? What would the actual deliverable be? What do we expect them to have learned about the brand and how it resonates with its target market—high school students? That was the foundation of how we started, and it just grew from there.”
The project launched in the fall of 2023, with students from Jones’ first three-section class working in small teams to create short, engaging storytelling videos that the LWV could use on social media. Since then, subsequent cohorts have continued to contribute to the project each semester, culminating in more than 17 different group projects. The campaign launched across a variety of social media platforms in spring 2024 before the April primary and will continue running through November’s presidential election.
Tidey notes that Wisconsin ranks #2 among states where young voters could influence the 2024 presidential race, according to Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.
“Anything we can do to connect with them, prepare them, and encourage them to register and to vote is important,” she says. “Connecting with them where they are (rvotematters2 on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and Twitter) and providing encouragement and accurate information about registration and voting gives us our best chance to reach them. The videos created by WSB students are a great tool to encourage and support them.”
Experiential learning using brand principles, brand values
Tidey drove up from Milwaukee and joined the first class for an “open Q&A,” Jones says, talking about everything from why voting is important to how to make a message effective to putting oneself in the shoes of the high school target audience.
“What are the things they care about? How do they see the world?” says Jones. “By far one of my favorite takeaways of the course is that it requires that they think about how they form a network with what does the average student in Milwaukee look like? What are some of their values? Milwaukee is very diverse, so for a lot of our students, they have some expectation of ‘I’ve got to step outside of my comfort zone and research and learn about a group that may be different from mine.’”
One of the biggest challenges Jones and her classes talked about was scrolling: What gets high schoolers to “stop”? What’s going to grab their attention despite the preponderance of messages from other brands on these same platforms? Similar to the scene with the guidance counselor, many of the videos took a creative approach, such as a dating scenario, where a text conversation appears on the screen and before the girl agrees to going to the dance, she texts the boy, “Do you care about things that are bigger than yourself?”
The class also discussed brand values for nonprofits—how an organization does want to maintain a brand image, but “relative to for-profit brands, they are less interested in keeping their name at the forefront than they are their value mechanism at the forefront,” says Jones. “And yet, they still find a way of incorporating their brand elements into their touchpoints with their target market.”
“For our students, it may have seemed a little bit different from mainstream marketing, but it still offered them a lot of our brand management; they were still able to use these tools in a way that was impactful across several different areas.”
The teams benefited from check-ins throughout the semester, including around production, where there was no expectation of state-of-the-art, professional quality.
“What we wanted them to hit were the basics of managing this brand, this campaign, and satisfying their customer,” says Jones. “And they just blew us out of the water with the quality they produced.”
‘Encouraging high school students that their voice matters’
Senior Hailey Ens says that the video campaign with LWV through Jones’ class was “one of the most valuable projects I’ve worked on here at WSB. I had a unique experience because one year before I took Jones’ class, I was a marketing intern with LWV working with the same connection point, Leigh Ann Tidey.”
During her internship, Ens says she and Tidey discussed potential ways to improve the organization’s future campaigns—which led to Tidey reaching out to Jones.”
“Being able to continue my work with an organization I’m passionate about while still making progress toward completing my degree and being able to speak to my learnings and impact in interviews has enabled me to lock down post-grad opportunities,” says Ens. “I’m incredibly grateful for Jones’ dedication to building her students’ skillset through tangible experiences that will actually set them apart.”
Jones says her focus for the campaign was ensuring that students gained experience designing a campaign that moved a brand forward. But given growing political activism among students—and Jones says that UW students are extremely diverse in political opinion—sometimes “it helps to be doing something that we feel matters.”
“I imagine that working with each other in just encouraging people to elevate their voices, encouraging these high school students that their voice matters, and that even though they are young, the things that they care about can be influenced—I hope that left them smiling a bit,” she says. “They can still think back and say, ‘At least I did something that touched this.’”
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