From Amanda Hill - Target
Hello again from Minneapolis! I’m about halfway through my summer internship at Target and things are starting to warm up—in the office and out. It’s probably about 100 degrees here, and my project is heating up. I’ve reached the point in the summer when it’s time to start piecing together all of my research and meetings for my rapidly-evolving final deliverable—a multichannel strategy. The support and the resources have been great. I’ve had access to many departments and functions including Marketing, Analytics, Strategic Pricing, Promotional Planning, and the list goes on.
I’ve also had a chance to have coffee with many people and shadow different buyers across the company to get a sense of the different career paths and the culture. Basically, there’s no absolute career path. If you’re interested in an area, you can get there. In the merchandising pyramid, we just got through the forecast period, which was great to see as part of the Home Improvement and Automotive department. Teams are also starting to set up their new aisle plans, and I’ve been able to shadow a buyer in Beauty and in Baby to see how they set up their aisles, what they look for from a financial and visual perspective, and how they sell it in to their management. It’s been a great look at the process, the negotiations with vendors, and the accountability required of the buyer role.
We’ve also had some fun here in Minneapolis. We spent an afternoon at Target Field watching the Twins and Tampa play and also built some Target furniture for transitional housing. It was cool to see the groups of red t-shirted interns (undergrad and grad) putting together bookcases, nightstands, and dressers. And we just had our summer MBA soiree, which gave us an opportunity to meet interns from other companies here in the area and have a few drinks on a roof deck in the city.
The summer is just flying by, and it’s continued to be full of great work and great culture. Target does believe that “Speed is life….” so here we go!
From Shirley Lin - Amazon
Hello again from Seattle! As a Retail Management Intern, Books In-Stock, I am continuing my customer analytics project to analyze traffic to specific book titles and make recommendations on how to improve customer experience and the Books team's financial and in-stock metrics
My role requires pretty heavy usage of SQL, which was expected but at the same time I was surprised that I would have to learn SQL to the depth that I have. I spent the first three weeks really getting into the weeds, understanding Amazon's multitude of databases (there is no lack of data here!) and what the data actually means. I spent the subsequent four weeks speaking with people across many groups (books, kindle, print-on-demand) and functional groups (in-stock, product managers, traffic, web analytics) to understand how I could use the knowledge and insights I was gaining to make recommendations to Amazon and my team.
While I have a quantitative background and feel comfortable with numbers, this has been a great challenge and learning experience for me as I've had to look at data for thousands of customers and millions of transactions and try to make sense of it. While my project focus has been more specific than others, I'm glad that I've gotten to dig into the core competency of Amazon (using data to understand their customers) and work with a diverse set of people. I'm inspired to learn more about the different customer analytics roles there are both at Amazon and in the technology industry.
From Gayley Woolston – Chase Credit Card
Hello again from Wilmington Delaware. I am really enjoying getting to know Chase’s business, products, and employees.
My main project thus far is to design and execute the strategies and marketing for loyalty events to help differentiate our card from other products and build customer satisfaction; it is going fairly well. I am learning how to write creative briefs, interfacing with the in-house and external research arms, and coordinating all the strategies from Chase, our partner, and 3rd party vendors. The exposure to so many different parts of Chase and various other companies has been so enlightening, and I have learned so much about how culture really impacts how business is transacted. I am struggling a bit with the fact that some companies’ cultures do not stress timeliness the way I am accustomed to from working in finance.
One of my bosses, as a side project, asked me to research chatter on blogs and social media, and this request has now turned into another full project, where I am conducting a competitive landscape analysis on Travel & Entertainment companies’ social media strategies and offering a plan for our card. My team really appreciates my findings and my generational perspective. I also have an additional project working on combining the strategies and communication touch points for new customers between Chase, our partner rewards programs, and the joint programs planned for the fall. While this has been a bit slow going, I am excited that we will use the information from focus groups occurring as we speak to finalize the plans in a few weeks.
I have also had the opportunity to meet with people throughout the organization, in risk, finance, marketing services, other business units, and discovered a competitive landscape group and strategy group through networking. One of my favorite parts of working at Chase is learning about the diverse roles and groups at the organization, and, actually, my networking has been helpful as I need to reach out to various parts Chase to retrieve data and execute the marketing materials. By the end of the summer, I cannot wait to see some of my marketing materials in print/email/other channels.
My projects continue to change due to our partner’s needs, new data, new findings from my assignments, but by summer end, I am excited to see the final results of the loyalty event marketing execution and the implementation of my strategy from social media and new customer research.
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