Marketing students excel during international creative collaboration with partner institutions

Unique collaboration with Kirkwood College and BISM in Romania sees creative marketing campaigns pitched to expert panel

An international creative challenge managed by Abertay University saw creative digital marketing campaigns researched, designed, and pitched to global drinks brand Heineken.

Abertay’s Dundee Business School nurtures long-term partnerships with partner institutions including Kirkwood Community College, Iowa, USA, and BISM, Bucharest, Romania, with a view to encouraging inclusivity, collaboration, student mobility, and multi-cultural learning.

The three-way partnership began as an online challenge in 2020 but has since grown to include campus visits and is now a core part of Abertay’s undergraduate marketing degree programmes.

Bringing the partners together for a specialist marketing challenge, the project with Heineken saw Marketing students from all three institutions work together on a creative pitch after carrying out market research, identifying target audiences, developing a compelling proposition, and producing promotional materials.

Academics from the three institutions collaborated with Heineken to judge the best creative concept.

Kirkwood students, visiting Dundee from Iowa, participated in a workshop with Insights, a global leader in people development. They also visited DC Thomson, Michelin Scotland Innovation Parc, Abertay’s new CoSTAR Realtime Lab for virtual production at Water’s Edge. Elsewhere, they took part in tours, talks and Q&A sessions with academic and professional services colleagues.

Dr Kathy-Ann Fletcher of Dundee Business School said:

We’re really proud of this project which has grown substantially and is designed to show students what’s possible when a university experience is built around employability and the opportunity to work with different countries. Through this engagement they have all learned collaborative skills and cultural literacy, coupled with access to top-level industry professionals from a wide range of organisations.

Kirkwood Instructor Tara Allen said:

This partnership has been a transformative initiative. Surveys from last year’s participants showed an increase in confidence in working across cultures and faculty reported enhanced engagement and creative problem-solving among students, clearly demonstrating the impact.

Heineken’s head of change enablement Jim Macgregor said:

We’re thrilled with the consistently high quality of work produced by students and their ability to grasp complex challenges and deliver actionable solutions is impressive. We’re particularly impressed by their professionalism and industry-ready outputs. This collaboration has offered intriguing insights for Heineken and allowed me to mentor the next generation of marketers.