Andrew Cummings ’23, an Illinois State University MBA student, never envisioned himself as a marketer. But through a summer course collaboration with AllPeople Marketplace, a socially conscious startup retailer, Cummings has gained a better understanding of, and appreciation for, marketing.
“By actually doing marketing work, it shifted my view of it to a holistic perspective,” Cummings said. “I learned that marketing should be involved in every aspect of a business because you want to keep a consistent vision. Marketing is a lot more than just creating an advertisement or doing a sales pitch.”
Cummings and his classmates enrolled in Dr. Peter Kaufman’s MBA marketing capstone class spent six weeks creating a marketing plan and tweaking current marketing strategies for AllPeople Marketplace, a soon-to-launch online retailer that sells organic pantry items and donates 5% of every purchase to select nonprofit organizations. Customers can also invest in the business.
“It’s been an invaluable experience,” Cummings said. “This is the kind of work you just can’t get anywhere else besides having a job.”
Cummings earned his undergraduate degree in business information systems last spring, and he plans to pursue law school in hopes of running a consulting firm.
Along with his classmates, Cummings collaborated on the project with Bill Wollrab, AllPeople Marketplace’s founder and chairman, and a Bloomington native. Wollrab cofounded the Yard House Restaurant chain in Long Beach, California, in 1995, which was sold to the Olive Garden Restaurant chain in 2012.
“I learned that marketing should be involved in every aspect of a business because you want to keep a consistent vision.”
Andrew Cummings
AllPeople Marketplace is a business venture developed by Wollrab over the past five years. It has accumulated a diversified number of supporters and has acquired partnerships with six nonprofits.
“What we’re trying to do here is create an ecosystem or community of like-minded socially and environmentally responsible consumers, nonprofits, and for-profits, which are the product manufacturers, to create this catalyst for what we think could be large scale social environmental change,” Wollrab said.
By developing a marketing plan for Wollrab’s business, Kaufman’s students identified AllPeople Marketplace’s target market as motivated and value-conscious buyers, with a special focus on Gen Z and Millennials, due to their tendencies to shop based on values instead of brands.
Cummings’s group also worked to identify the type of nonprofit organizations AllPeople should partner with and the marketing strategy the company should use to reach Gen Z and Millennial buyers.
“We’ve segmented down to environmental and animal welfare nonprofits. This is something that millennials and Gen Z are very passionate about,” Cummings said. “We also focused on recruiting micro influencers (on social media) to promote the brand.”
Wollrab said he was “very impressed” with the plan that Cummings and his classmates presented. He forwarded their recommendations to AllPeople Marketplace’s eight-person marketing team.
“It’s good to have an outside perspective, because I’ve been doing this for five years now, and sometimes I get caught in the forest, and I can’t see the trees, as they say,” Wollrab said.
Kaufman, the professor leading the course, was grateful for Wollrab’s willingness to collaborate with his students, to provide a real-world business experience.
“Projects that involve live clients tend to be harder for students because they’re used to having a lot of structure. And in the real world, they just don’t have that,” Kaufman said. “So, they have to apply heavy doses of critical thinking, which is great for them.”
As AllPeople Marketplace launches this fall, three undergraduate marketing classes in Illinois State’s College of Business are expanding upon the MBA class’s work this semester and continuing to collaborate with Wollrab.
“We’ll have four different marketing courses (including the summer MBA course) that are going through this process with hundreds of students. That’s a lot of impact,” Kaufman said. “Bill will hopefully be able to use all of this work and the recommendations, which will hopefully help his company be successful.”
