Hey Albright, it has been awhile! Summary so far in the Intern Life of Tori Sweeney…I had spent six weeks interning in the Accounting Department at Fromm Electric and then I transitioned to the Marketing Department for three weeks. (Today is actually my last day in marketing!) I have enjoyed every minute in the marketing department, which actually surprised me. I have taken a marketing class before and was never really fond of it, but it is completely different learning about marketing techniques than it is to actually be apart of the process. I have done a range of things from taking inventory of materials, to market research on magazine publications, to printing marketing flyers, to actually starting and finishing a project. It has been interesting learning how the marketing department has evolved over the years to where it is now and various types of marketing that has been done. Below is a picture of some of the marketing materials that are pretty common to see…
One thing I learned which is super cool is that Fromm is apart of a group called Affiliated Distributors, aka AD. AD is a way for smaller companies to come together to better compete with bigger businesses. Generally, when a company orders more of a product from a manufacturer, there is a discounted price. So small, little old Company A might be buying 1,000 of a product while big, chain Company B might be buying 100,000 of that product. Company B is going to get it for a cheaper price than Company A, selling it for cheaper, and, in turn, having an advantage over Company A. AD tries help out companies like Company A. All the companies in AD come together and say, “Okay, we all need 2,000 of this product so we will make one giant order of it, get it at a lower price and we will be able to competitively price our product compared to bigger companies.” Pretty cool!
I mentioned that I started and finished a project in the beginning of this blog. What was that project, you might ask? I was put in charge of making hanging price labels for the sale room. Sounds simple, yes. Was it as simple as it sounds? No. The interesting thing with this project, though, is why I was doing it. One of the vendors that Fromm heavily works with did a market research study and found that sales had increased 20% with the use of these bracketed price hangers. The group here at Reading wanted to try this theory out and the vendor offered to start us off by giving us some of these bracket hangers. I was given a list of almost 300 products with some info about each product and with that I had to make the price tag. I set the whole thing up as a mail merge so that the process would be easy with the gathering of a report. There were a lot of roadblocks that I hit because Microsoft Word and Excel aren’t exactly the easiest programs to work with at times. In the end it turned out perfectly and everyone loved it.
Overall I had a great time in Marketing and got along with the marketing team really well. My next department will be Human Resources and I am excited to see what I will learn and be doing over there for a few weeks!
Above is a picture of my Marketing Manager, Ed, sporting his “I Survived the Intern” pin that he made.
(Hopefully not suggesting that he is super happy to have me move on out of his department!)
ALBRIGHT ELCDC 