High Caliber Advice: Students Prove Themselves Adept Business Consultants
Posted in: MBA
Despite its name, American Dream had become a nightmare for its owners. The sprawling entertainment and retail complex, located just seven miles from midtown Manhattan in East Rutherford, NJ, housed name brand stores, from American Eagle to Zales. Big SNOW, North America’s only indoor ski resort with real snow year-round, and a mammoth water park were two of its many attractions. Yet consumers and business-to-business customers steered clear. Shuttering the newly- opened complex in the middle of the pandemic didn’t help, but foot traffic and awareness were still unacceptably low when it reopened—requiring new marketing strategies.
Students in two sections of the business consulting experience course at the Feliciano School of Business were assigned the task, under the leadership of associate professor Josh Lupinek, and adjunct professor and veteran marketer Geoffrey Chellis. Acting as business consultants, 26 students were divided into competitive teams to come up with practical recommendations to be presented to American Dream executives. In Chellis’s section, students tackled how to make the complex the first choice for corporate events. Chellis had them talk to event planners that he knew from his years in business, but also pushed them to reach out to their own networks.
The final proposals ranged from inviting corporate planners for a scavenger hunt to a cookoff competition using chefs from American Dream restaurants as judges. The winning proposal involved marketing Big SNOW to winter sport manufacturers as a trade show destination. American Dream also hired two students full-time. Boosting tourism to the complex and drumming up community interaction was the challenge for Lupinek’s students. Finding and promoting less publicized ethnic holidays was key. After two on-site listening tours, students created a year-long calendar of ethnic holidays and spoke with community leaders about using American Dream for small festivals and events. In November 2023, American Dream scheduled a Day of the Dead parade, a Hispanic festival of remembrance, pitched by the students. The value to students of this experiential work, Lupinek says, is “confidence, encouragement, constructive criticism, networking opportunities, and a chance to understand that not everything is as black and white as textbooks and numbers lead [us] to believe.”