This year, the students had a great opportunity to take on some interesting challenges with a new project: executing a social media marketing plan for a real Finnish company to enter a foreign market. The company is Mirka Ltd, one of the world’s leading companies in surface finishing technology which offers a wide range of sanding solutions for the finishing and precision industry. With the help of Ms. Minna Nyman - Marketing manager at Mirka Ltd and Senior Lecturer in International Business, Ms. Rosmeriany Nahan-Suomela, the students applied the theories to practice and delivered the final social media plan in the new markets through a long period of researching, reading and executing the new ideas for different markets in Africa. The project required a comprehensive analysis of the markets such as customer analysis, competitor analysis and company SWOT analysis and analysis of culture in understanding social media behavior in Nigeria, Ethiopia and Kenya.
Company internationalization is more complicated that our group thought which required deep understanding about the company, the new market and the message that we want to deliver to. In order to deliver the message we gave Mirka several suggestions which social media platform to use, what could be the content and some examples of posters to use.
Final stage of the course was a seminar day and we were invited to Mirka Ltd to present our research. The seminar was held in Keppo, Mirka´s guesthouse. At first we had an opportunity to listen to a presentation about “Digital transformation and customer experience process at Mirka” by Commercial Manager, Digital Service at Mirka, Ms. Annika Peltola. Then it got to a point where six groups had to present their research results. The feedback for presentations were positive and Ms.Minna Nyman mentioned that they got some good ideas that they would like to implement.
“Digital transformation and customer experience process at Mirka” by Annika Peltola.
After receiving feedback from the lecturer and the company guests we had an opportunity to have a small tour to visit beer factory.
Overall this project needed a lot of work and at times it was very stressful. It required serious commitment because it was made for a real company. This project taught us how to work in an international team and how to manage time. In the end we are fortunate about the gained knowledge and practical knowledge. Also, we were fortunate that we could help Mirka to be more successful in African markets.
“A good opportunity to test ourselves for the working life”.
"It was very tough for us to do this research. We did social marketing research on how they use socal media marketing. By the way it was a good research, and was done together. Now, we know how to do social marketing research in a country.”
“The course provided me the basics of international marketing and I learned that it is quite challenging to create a marketing plan for a company especially if the target country has limited information about their marketing behavior, particularly in social media behaviour. However, the course did serve enough information to atleast create a viable plan.”
Texts by Hieu Dinh, Chris Allou, Imran Bhuiyan, MD Siyam AI – Din Khan, Robert Bocksruth, Dalton, Emma Phillip, Pere Piñol, Marta García Hernández, Trinh Dinh,Getter Kiisk, Arnau Castells, Sari Laatu
Pictures by Rosmeriany Nahan-Suomela