Summary
This year, I interned for the company SWAMR HR, their parent company being ThoughtWave Software and Solutions. SWARM HR is a company in the IT Industry, and I worked in the Marketing and Sales Department as an Inside Sales Intern. SWARM HR’s product, SWARM HR, is a workforce automation software. It helps businesses migrate to managing their employees full-time electronically, with modules for HR, ATS, and Accounting/Payroll. The business area I researched for my project was Visual Marketing. This area was one I got to explore in my internship, as I helped come up with newsletter content, infographics, and types of online advertising.
My business project questions were: 1) why is visual marketing important? and 2) how effective is visual marketing in gaining consumer interest? I researched these areas primarily through secondary sources, some examples of these being news articles, academic papers, and personal blogs. I also had assistance from my father during my research, as he has worked in digital marketing and adjacent areas for about twenty years. This was my primary source and interview, as he helped me understand the area I was researching better and provided clarification when necessary.
I learned a great deal regarding visual marketing, social networking, and advertising through my research project and internship experiences. In a world that is becoming increasingly technological, images and graphics mean more than ever. All over the world, people’s overall attention spans have been decreasing at a faster and faster rate (McClinton 2019). The role visual marketing plays in gathering consumer interest is difficult to quantify, beyond the knowledge that the role it plays is most certainly big. A research paper on the correlation between visual marketing and consumer-brand relationships found that the more entertaining and engaging visual content was, the more likely consumers were to recognize it and share it (Kujur and Singh 2020). With many other studies showing similar results, it is clear to see that visual marketing plays an important role in the sale of products. My experience as an intern helped me understand and work through the real world processes that are involved with visual marketing, and also helped me identify what both good and bad visual marketing would consist of. My research offered me theoretical knowledge on visual marketing, whereas my internship offered me real-world experience regarding the same. Putting both these together helped me understand the area which I was researching to a much better degree. Lastly, the main limitations I faced in effectively completing my project were lack of access to material and lack of expertise.
My key takeaways from this experience was improved marketing skills, an introduction to sales, and business experience. My research can help me in the future by providing perspective on marketing tactics as both a consumer and a potential employee/entrepreneur. The skills I have gained as a result of working in sales can be employed in a variety of areas, from improved persuasive skill to more effective projection and self-confidence. The issues I had were overall relatively minor, and would have easily been fixed by moving to an in-person internship, which, sadly, wasn’t possible this year. Overall, my internship at SWARM HR was a very valuable experience and am really grateful for the opportunity to be a part of it.
Publication Date
8-2020
Advisor(s)
Justin Jassal, Ramesh Thumu; SWARM HR, President of Thoughtwave Software and Solutions
Keywords
Innovation, Workforce Development, Career Pathways, Career Development
Disciplines
Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Venkatraman, Shivani '21, "The Value of Visual Marketing as a Tool to Gain Consumer Interest" (2020). 2020 Intern Reports. 15.
https://digitalcommons.imsa.edu/intern_reports_2020/15