RMIT: Marketing Melbourne with Visit Victoria at RMIT Open Day

RMIT Marketing students presented a Work Integrated Learning (WIL) project at RMIT Open Day 2022 as part of a School of Marketing partnership with Visit Victoria.

Interactive Marketing students were tasked with creating a campaign encouraging people to visit Melbourne’s CBD with Visit Victoria acting as the client, providing feedback and guidance.

Student Miranda Ho was at Open Day to explain her team’s concept.

“We had to come up with a way to convince Aussies that Melbourne is the place to be,” Miranda said.

“The big idea to our campaign was ‘Melbourne is back and it’s better than ever’ and we reinforced this using three interactive social media tactics across TikTok and Instagram.”

RMIT Photography student, Nguyen Phuong Le, brough the project to life by taking some quirky photos of iconic Melbourne landmarks.

Bernardo Figueiredo, External Engagement Coordinator in the School of Marketing, said presenting the project at Open Day was a great way to demonstrate the applied learning involved in RMIT’s partnership with Visit Victoria.

“We always tell people our courses are applied, but parents and prospective students don’t necessarily know what that means,” he said.

“So, we wanted to showcase our students and our applied courses, make it interactive and give them a tangible example of what applied means to us.”

The team at Open Day walked visitors through how the partnership extends beyond the Interactive Marketing course.

“We’re trying a different model of partnership now with Visit Victoria across the different courses in the marketing discipline – so it’s not like a one off,” Bernardo said.

Academics have written stories on the history of Melbourne’s coffee culture and music scene for the Winter and upcoming Spring Visitor Guide.

Visit Victoria are also assisting students in Bernardo’s Customer Experience subject, looking at a project to get young people of culturally diverse backgrounds to visit regional Victorian events like White Night Festival in Bendigo and Geelong.

Bernardo said these experiences give students a real insight into how industry works.

“Usually when you first learn frameworks at university, they’re not immediately applicable – you get the case study that is very neat, but then reality is very complex,” he said.

“When we work with a real client, students are forced to think about that complexity and about how to apply those frameworks, and that’s how they learn.

“By doing this work they’re building their portfolio, so if they go to a job interview, they’ll be able to showcase the work they’ve done with real clients.

“I’ve had many cases where a client ends up hiring a student or executing what the students suggested.”

For Miranda, who is in her final semester of a Master of Marketing, the industry partnership has made a big difference in her own career.

“Working with real industry professionals at such an amazing company like Visit Victoria has opened a lot of doors for me,” she said.

“It’s honestly something I never got before coming to RMIT.”