Morello, Robert. “Five Tips for Marketing to College Students.” Small Business. Houston Chronicle, n.d. Web. 06 Dec. 2014.

Robert Morello is a Columbia graduate, a writer, and professor of travel and tourism. He has also worked in marketing and consulting. This article stems more from his marketing experience. “Five Tips for Marketing to College Students” is a condensed set of ideas for companies of all fields to use in their marketing toward people of college age. The intended audience is small companies looking to market their brand toward young adults and especially college students. The five ideas stated in the article are: “Follow the Money,” focusing on parents that fund college students, “Get Them Involved,” acknowledging the importance of interactivity between the product and the consumer through social media and advertising, “Harness Enthusiasm,” which is essentially playing off of young people’s avoidance of mainstream anything, “Giveaways,” using free swag to get the company’s name out there, and “Responsibility,” associating the company with causes that college students believe in in order to win their moral approval as an establishment. Morello claims that these five advertising techniques are key to marketing toward college students.

This article provides some interesting ideas for marketing techniques, but only gives a general overview of ways to execute the ideas presented. It would benefit the reader more to have included some input from actual college students rather than just present an idea of how they think. The article does have the bias of an author who is thinking primarily of how to generate revenue, which works for making money but can create a superficial tone for the company in my view. The article suggests harnessing student ambassadors to spread the word about the company, but I have seen this happen before and it makes for a weird, kind of forced social exchange between student ambassadors and their peers that makes for a weird image of the company. Overall I think the most useful part of the article is the piece about giveaways. We had considered this before, but in a more restricted way than suggested in the article. Morello provides the idea of giving out living essentials to college students, for example hairbands, toothbrushes, or phone wallets, to keep the company’s name in mind when students are using these items. I think White Space would benefit most from this kind of advertising, making this article relevant to our paper, even if just by this blurb.