Goal 2 | Articulating our shared agendas Objective | Promoting multidirectional benefits
Connecting college students with downtown Kalamazoo
For years, the restaurants and retailers that populate Kalamazoo’s downtown area have desired to see a stronger college student presence—especially from students under 21 years old—at their tables and in their stores. This desire only increased when a recent retail analysis commissioned for the downtown area noted significant unrealized potential in the spending of student consumers between 18 and 21 years of age. The desire was so strong, in fact, that Downtown Kalamazoo Incorporated, a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring that downtown Kalamazoo businesses thrive, has for many years bussed 1,200 first-year students into the downtown area at the beginning of each fall term as part of Western Michigan University’s Fall Welcome week. The goal of this excursion was to introduce new students to the business offerings of downtown Kalamazoo—offerings that sit just one mile away from main campus. And, to keep these students coming back to the downtown area, many retailers and restaurateurs offer current WMU students discount incentives.
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Still, the effectiveness of the event programming and the discount incentives were unclear. According to Sue Huggett, the marketing and engagement manager for DKI, the question of effectiveness lingered for downtown area businesses that wondered “why we didn’t see more student involvement and presence” as a result of these efforts. To look into strategies for improving college student involvement in the downtown Kalamazoo area and for tapping into the power of student spending, DKI partnered with WMU professor Dr. JoAnn Atkin’s spring 2018 undergraduate marketing research course. The goal of the partnership was, as Huggett explains, to push beyond hunches about student involvement and presence and obtain “tangible evidence” and “research” about college-student consumer behavior. This goal matched well with Atkin’s approach to teaching. Atkin, who has a strong track record of working on marketing projects with local businesses and organizations through the WMU Business Connection office, believes in applied learning and teaching. Students receive a more valuable educational experience when they “take textbook knowledge and concepts and apply those to a current marketing challenge faced by organizations.” This applied approach enhances student learning and it provides organizations with useful information upon which they can act. Working with DKI, Atkin planned a multi-stage research project that tasked her 37 students with conducting an in-depth interview and