# Marketing / Strategic Communication — steal this assignment
_EL3vate 2026 · Day 8 · Part 05 of 15 · build 3dfcaff_

## Try it Tuesday (90 minutes)
90 minutes, one real client named at the start — a campus club works. Minutes 0–10: write the client's actual objective in one sentence. Minutes 10–40: run the twelve-positioning-statements prompt, then cut to three, writing a one-line rationale for every cut. Minutes 40–75: an arm's-length test — students show the three surviving positions to people from other majors and record which the stranger believed and which they distrusted on sight. Minutes 75–90: report the gap between the position the team liked and the one outsiders trusted. The deliverable is the cut rationale plus the arm's-length notes; it grades the judgment that survives after AI supplies the volume.

## The assignment
**Make it (3D print · laser cut).** Physical packaging or a point-of-sale piece for a real local client. Holding a mockup surfaces every decision a slide deck hides: size, weight, what the customer reads first from arm’s length.

**Build it (AI chat · no code).** A message-testing harness. Students generate a wide spread of positioning variants, then build a simple landing page per variant and measure. The AI supplies volume; the student supplies the judgment about which variant is worth defending.

## 4-week plan
- **Wk 1.** Land one real client, even a campus organization. Written brief, signed by the client — enough to design the packaging or point-of-sale mockup from.
- **Wk 2.** Submit the packaging cut file at the start of the week. Generate wide with AI in class, then cut down to three positions with a written rationale per cut.
- **Wk 3.** Build one page per position, run whatever traffic is available for five days.
- **Wk 4.** Client presentation with the physical mockup and the actual numbers. The client picks. Students debrief the gap between their favorite and the client’s.

## What this replaces
- **Replaces:** The semester campaign deck presented to the class.
- **What is lost:** The polished, comprehensive campaign document and its production values.
- **What is gained:** Students practice the actual professional move — killing nine plausible ideas and defending why — instead of over-investing in one campaign picked in week two; the grade rewards discrimination over decoration.

## Where AI is bad at this
A model generates marketing copy that is fluent, on-trend, and strategically empty — converging on the same benefit language ('elevate', 'seamless', 'community') regardless of product, and asserting a differentiator without evidence any customer cares about it. Its output looks like a finished campaign while smuggling in unvalidated claims, some of which — health, sustainability — invite regulatory and skeptical scrutiny it never flags.

## Rubric
| Criterion | Weight | What it assesses |
|---|---|---|
| Strategic diversity of the spread | 20% | The retained positions rest on genuinely different bets — need, competitor, required belief — not reworded versions of one idea. |
| Quality of the cut rationale | 30% | Each elimination is justified against the client's objective and audience, not the team's taste. |
| Evidence of audience reaction | 30% | The arm's-length test is reported honestly, distinguishing what an outsider believed from what the team hoped. |
| Claim scrutiny | 20% | Flags positions that depend on unproven or regulated claims before they anchor the campaign. |

## Starter prompt
> Generate twelve distinct positioning statements for this product, aimed at this audience: [describe product and audience]. Make them genuinely different from each other in strategy, not in wording: vary what need is being claimed, what the competition is, and what the customer has to believe. Number them. Then for each one, write the single sentence a skeptical customer would say to reject it.

## Budget & logistics
- **Instructor prep:** 1 hours
- **Class time:** 90 minutes
- **Per-student cost:** $0 for the Tuesday version; roughly $10–20 per team in print or cut stock **[unverified]** for packaging or point-of-sale mockups in the four-week version.
- **Fabrication file due:** First day of Week 2 — submit the packaging cut file at the start of the week the positions are chosen; it is designed from the week-1 client brief. PACE quotes 7–10 business days (up to 14 calendar days), so it clears before the week-4 client presentation.
- **Calendar dependency:** Message testing needs no lead time. The packaging mockup is designed from the week-1 client brief, so its file goes in at the start of week 2 and the up-to-14-calendar-day turnaround clears before the week-4 client presentation.

## Three sizes
- **One session:** The 90-minute generate-cut-test session producing a cut rationale and arm's-length notes; no fabrication.
- **4 weeks:** The seeded four-week plan: signed client brief, wide generation cut to three, one landing page per position with real traffic, then a client presentation with the physical mockup and the numbers.
- **One semester:** A full client engagement — brief, wide generation, a multivariate landing-page test with real traffic, fabricated packaging, and a final debrief on the gap between the team's favorite and the client's choice.

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_PACE · Shidler College of Business · University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa · pace.shidler.hawaii.edu/maker_
_All fifteen assignments, the demos and every handout: https://el3vate.vercel.app_