A group of marketing seniors in the Naveen Jindal School of Management completed a longitudinal study this fall to determine what factors bestin-class marketing organizations cultivate in collaboration with Austin-based agency VisionEdge Marketing.

The course — Marketing Capstone Senior Project (MKT 4395) — was taught by Professor Rita Egeland, a lecturer in the Marketing Area. It usually pairs companies with students to act as an agency and develop a marketing plan for them. However, when Egeland spoke with VisionEdge Marketing President Laura Patterson about the research project, she said the opportunity was too good to pass up.

“Patterson is so engaged in mentoring students,” Egeland said. “This was her way of giving back. Clearly, she and her own team could have done it faster. But she appreciated the perspective the students might provide – and it fit with her desire to help develop this next generation of marketers.”

The study had previously found quantitative factors such as the number of employees and budget were not directly correlated to high-performing marketing departments (known as Value Creators). So instead, the Capstone students examined qualitative factors, marketing senior Hasan Sagarwala said.

“We specifically wanted to determine if a relationship existed between company culture and marketing personas and if a relationship existed between leadership styles and marketing personas. We were hoping to identify what enables Value Creators to emerge in an organization,” Sagarwala said.

Sagarwala said the team started by creating survey questions, going through databases and determining qualified participants. From there, he led the email marketing efforts.

“It’s very similar to cold calls, because you don’t really know if they’re going to respond, and they probably won’t,” he said. “Enticing readers to open the email, go through and actually take the survey — that was a really fun part for me. I got to really learn what it was like to do a professional survey.”

Sagarwala said he had prior experience creating surveys from an earlier Jindal School course.

“I took a marketing research class where we got to understand how to create a survey, how to field it and what insights to make out of it,” he said. “I feel like that was directly correlated with this project.”

Kathleen Wong BS’21 worked on interpreting the data as the responses came in. During the surveying process, the team worked through obstacles, she said.

“One of the issues we encountered was that we didn’t really have a high response rate,” Wong said. “So, we extended the time period to collect their responses and even then, we had to figure out how to use the information.”

While still in the classroom setting, working through this sort of issue provides students with valuable experience, Egeland said.

“The opportunities to run into some of these challenges before you are being evaluated as an employee are critical,” Egeland said. “This is a great opportunity to make many mistakes in order to learn as much as possible early on.”

Wong, who is now studying for her Master’s in Business Analytics at JSOM, said this research project is what made her decide to pursue that field.

“Before, in my stats classes, I didn’t really understand what was the purpose of probability and standard deviation,” she said. “With this project, I gained a lot of insight in and perspective on how it’s used in the real world.”