Week Eight: 26 - 30 July

It is week eight of the first Brunswick Internship programme for 2010. The interns talk us through what they got up to day by day.

This is the ninth blog entry from the 2010 Brunswick Six,
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By Brunswick Interns

Monday 26 July (Thandi)

Its crazy, the weeks have flown by, and we are already in week 8. We arrived at the office this morning looking forward to our free session, as we have a lot of work to get done this week, including the Cadbury’s vs. Kraft presentation, Chris’s press releases for Three Weeks, the ‘Too Big to Fail’ book review, and Simon Leigh’s assignment on the media landscape. Brenda, Keosha and I had the whole morning free so we got some work done, but the boys had a session with Sarah where they went over their feedback from Brunswick, TB, UnicornJobs and the other interns.

In the afternoon we had a session with Chris on marketing and advertising. The session touched on some topics we discussed in the first week, when we talked about the differences between marketing, advertising and PR. At that time, none of us knew the exact differences between the three, but eight weeks on we have gained a better understanding of the similarities and differences between them. Marketing, for example, speaks to the consumer directly and creates its own media; advertising targets consumers by buying media and PR influences and informs the media by speaking to various stakeholders. We went over sponsorship, celebrity endorsements, Unique Selling Points (USPs), corporate reputation, and the 4P’s of Marketing. Overall, the session was really helpful in summarising the purposes and practices of these three fields.

Tuesday 27 July (Nahidur)

In the morning we had a free session, but we all had work to get on with. We were all working on our new media assignment for Simon Leigh and our book reviews on ‘Too Big To Fail’ for James Olly. We also had to do our research for the Cadbury and Kraft presentations.

In the afternoon we had a final session with Chris in which we gave feedback on our sessions with him. We also went through everything that we did with him, which made for a good refresher. We are all so grateful for all the time and effort that Chris has put into our sessions, making them so full of information.

Wednesday 28 July (Ataur)

We began the day looking forward to our visit to the London Metal Exchange (LME). Most trades are completed electronically, but the LME is the only exchange left where it’s done via shouting and telephones. That wasn’t scheduled to begin until midday, though, so in the morning we worked on this week’s presentations: my team will argue why the acquisition of Cadbury by Kraft was a good idea.

However, at 10am, we were told to stop doing whatever we doing and go in to the small room where we were expecting a phone call from someone. This totally shocked and threw us, as none of us were expecting it. Nobody was giving anything away, and we were told to sit by the phone and wait for it to ring.

About 10 minutes later, the phone rang and Charlotte and James from Brunswick greeted us. James told us to stop working on the presentations for this week as he was setting us a new task: we were all given a crisis situation – the scenarios given ranged from a hijacked ship to a fire at the company headquarters – and we had 48 hours to come up with a communications strategy. We were also told that we would be presenting to James and Heather McGregor on Friday morning, and must produce a 1 page communications strategy for them.

This task changed all our plans, as we had two other assignments to hand in this week; an assignment on the changing media landscape as well as a book review. But we had no time to worry about it, as we had to prepare for the visit to LME.

All of us were looking forward to this visit immensely. Upon arrival, we were led to a room with a view of the trading floor below, and we observed as the bell rang every five minutes to signal the start of trading a different commodity. The traders were speaking down two telephones at the same time, and slowly, the low murmurings got louder and louder, so it was quite entertaining to watch. After that we headed back to the office to put the finishing touches to the various assignments due this week. It was nice to have a free session as it offered us a chance to begin on the task set to us in the morning.

We headed to UEL in the evening to attend the information session for the next internship due to begin in September. We interns had all attended a similar event last year, and this year we were able to pass on our wisdom to those who might follow us. We sat through the presentation by Heather and James, then had a networking session where we networked with those students interested enough to stay behind and learn more about the internship.

It was a long and tiring day with one major surprise destroying our plans, but for the boys, our extended day was still not complete. We wanted to get our group assignment completed today, so that we could concentrate on the other tasks, so we headed to the UEL library to make any final changes, eventually leaving well after 10pm.

Thursday 29 July (Akila)

Thursday morning and luckily we had a rare free session in the morning, giving us the opportunity to work on our surprise crisis management task, which was set on Wednesday. Intensive research and collecting data for that week’s presentation was high on everyone’s agenda that morning, and with so much to do and so little time to do it in, many skipped lunch in order to ensure that they were on top of things. The afternoon session saw us make our regular trip to Taylor Bennett, where we had interviewing sessions with some of the senior people there; we had the opportunity to experience how a real interview was carried out and gained some invaluable knowledge from it. After the session was finished many of us made our way back to the office, as we knew that we still had to finish work for our Friday deadline.

Friday 23 July am (Brenda)

Today we got the chance to present to Heather McGregor and James Olley for the first time- two very influential people in the PR and communications industry.

We had of course had a shock change of events during the course of the week: initially, we were given the task of preparing a case for the Kraft Cadbury takeover but on Wednesday we received a phone call from Charlotte and James to inform us that in the true nature of their work, we had all been assigned crises to deal with, which would require us to put our PR hats on and devise a communications strategy in a short space of time.

The situations ranged from fur protesters camping outside of a haute couture fashion chain to Angolan pirates hijacking a ship; all exciting stuff. I had a disaster at a logistics company headquarters. Putting together the strategy was an enjoyable task, in fact: we could be as creative as we wished as long as we addressed the ways in which we would handle each stakeholder.

We were also required to present 10 questions and answers that the key spokesperson might be asked by journalists (we found out at the end of the day why this was requested). Presenting to Heather and James was not as daunting as most of us anticipated, and at the end of each presentation we were provided with really good feedback. Our presentation skills and content has really improved over the past 8 weeks so it was a huge pleasure showing two people with huge investments in the programme how effectively our time has been used.

Friday 23 July pm (Keosha)

This afternoon we were granted the opportunity meet Elvira and Maria, who work at Brunswick in Brussels, and Patrick Handley, who is an expert in IPOs (Initial Public Offering).

Elvira and Maria gave us an insight into public affairs, and what their job entails; the Brussels office focuses on EU public and regulatory affairs, media relations and corporate reputation building. It was a welcome change to hear about this specific section within PR as we had never had an in depth explanation of public affairs, and it also demonstrated how Brunswick really is an international company.

Patrick Handley talked us through what an IPO was and some M&A case studies that he has been involved in. An Initial Public Offering is when a company issues common shares to the public for the first time; this is usually done when a company wishes to seek capital. This session was really interesting because I had never known how an IPO worked and it was a further insight into Financial PR.