Current Issues in Marketing Strategy

PWC is working hard on attracting graduates from a wider spread of backgrounds than just accountants. Major think tanking is directed towards improving the brand awareness of arts & marketing graduates. The main problem was diagnosed recently at the graduate fairs, when most students (outside Accounting) were unable recognize the brand or recite any of their community actions.

PWC have become more and more environmentally focused in recent times, trying to endear themselves to the societally minded youth of today. Continual attraction of the best and brightest graduates is essential to the ongoing success of PWC, on top of this, ingraining brand awareness at a young age is worth thousands of dollars of advertising years latter on.

What is particularly interesting at the moment is their methods of attracting graduates attention. Current strategy involves piling them with handouts as they walk past the stall. Critically evaluated, this strategy is less than impressive. The students are more likely to throw the handouts in the bin before they actually take the information in.

One idea that I was privy to was the distribution of 'magic 8 balls' with every second option being "Apply to PWC". There are not enough words to explain how short sighted this is. Gimmicks can attract attention occasionally, however for a professional organization, I would have hoped they 'connect' with students more. A strategic approach would align online marketing and community initiatives with todays youth and form an early relationship with them.

Josh Strawczynski's Opinion
A huge multinational company like PWC should better 'connect' with todays youth. Running focus groups, hiring social leaders and working on 'new age' media types connects best with a young crowd.

The other thing to remember is that a student crowd is full of a variety of different types of students, therefore, you need a variety of mediums to communicate with them. More can be done that just running a stall with hand outs....it is common sense!