Week 10 at Purpol Marketing by Intern Elizabeth Davenport

This week was a short one for me, following the August bank holiday on Monday and then a day off on Friday to move into my new home! After a busy weekend I have finally found the time to reflect on what I squeezed into last week and upload this post.

I spent Tuesday expanding on mine and Robbie’s research into boiler maintenance packages in preparation for presenting our findings to our client. I looked further into the deals and discounts that many of the insurance providers were offering, and discovered that there are often different offers available depending on whether you are an existing or new customer. I found this was very revealing of company aims and objectives. For example, if an exclusive offer is available only to new customers, the company is clearly geared towards the customer acquisition process. Meanwhile, Robbie looked into the promotional language and tools each company used. We discovered a great deal of similarity, using reassuring language, promising peace of mind and so on. Often companies play on the fear that if your boiler does break, it will happen in a catastrophic way, or at the most inconvenient time, encouraging customers to take out such “necessary” insurance packages.

I spent Thursday writing a report into these findings. I considered the prices and features expected of such maintenance packages, the USPs that set some of these packages apart from the competition and also the limitations that many packages stipulate, such as the age of the boiler. I got some good feedback on this report, so I’m really pleased that I was able to use my English skills despite writing about a topic that I have no prior knowledge or experience of.

In between research and report writing, I also found time to look at my latest whitepaper topics. I’ve experimented with a new approach this week, in that I create a solid document packed with research, definitions and sub-headings into each of my whitepaper topics, and then tackle the paper in full. This enables me to get straight on with writing, as all my research is ready waiting for me in a sort of chronological order. I now have a bank of topics with research ready to be written up next week!