A post by Katherine Mining
Open Systems Co-ordinator, Risk and Invesment
During the Covid-19 lockdown, we launched a Marketplace challenge asking university students to design marketing materials for our sewer misuse campaigns, specifically targeting one of three personas that represented some of our target customer groups.
We hoped that the challenge would offer an interesting project for students whose courses and placements had been affected by lockdown, as well as helping us to tap into their fresh ideas and behaviour change knowledge that could help us to reach customers in new and innovative ways.
The challenge sparked interest from many universities, even from a team in India, and we received entries from teams across the UK, not just in the Wessex Water region.
At the Challenge Final, held in July, teams presented their campaigns to a judging panel consisting of senior Wessex Water staff. The judges were very impressed with the quality of the campaigns and presentations and thanked the participants for the huge amount of effort that had clearly been invested in the entries.
After some tough deliberation, teams from Bournemouth University, UWE and University of Bath were crowned as winners.
Each winning team was awarded a cash prize, as well as the chance to see their ideas in future campaigns. On behalf of the judging panel, Sue Lindsay, Director of Customer Policy and Engagement, said: “We were really impressed with the creativity shown by the students and the wide variety of ideas that were presented. The next step for us is to look at which elements we can incorporate into future sewer misuse campaigns.”
We’d like to once again say a big thank you to everyone who took part in the challenge, and hope that you enjoyed the experience.