At the Handelslabbet

The renovation at the Handelslabbet is almost complete. Opening exhibition for the Retail lab has moved a bit further until October and hopefully things will settle down until then as more people would get vaccinated. There are many interesting things going on at the Handelslabbet. Technologies such as Virtual Reality devices etc. will be accessible for the people who will come to visit Handelslabbet. The posters I was working on, will soon be ready for the display at the Lab. We are looking forward to a very interesting window display for the lab, as well.

While working on my field study report, I was trying to link AI with circular economy within clothing and fashion industry and it gave me very limited number of articles. Among those, most were not even relevant. When I broadened my topic, then I was getting thousands of articles. That's when I realized how tricky systematic literature review could be.

During this whole internship period, I learned a lot. I read about and met many researchers who are working at very interesting disciplines such as applications of AI and VR in Textiles and Fashion industry.

I hope this Retail Lab will inspire students and companies to be involved in groundbreaking research areas. Hope to see most of you at the Re-opening exhibition in October.

Good luck for the new semester 😊

The Final Countdown (3/3)

Hope everyone has had amazing summer so far!  

With the last leg complete nearly complete, I'm surprised how much I've discovered about discourse analysis. It was not an easy ride but an adventurous one. Through the literature concerning the use of activist discourse, the topic that can be explored further in many ways. It has been a journey delving into discourse theory thinkers such as Foucault and Butler and being fascinated by the way they define discourse and the subject (self). So far I have gathered new skills through the coding software NVivo, which helped to organise the data and aid in my analysis. I look forward to the next stage of the course and opportunity to put what I learnt over the internships into practice. 

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Final Digital Marketing Update

 Hi all,

Here I am, finally writing my final blog post for the field study. My last week's in my internship have been proving very busy as I take on more responsibilities, even at the end! Though my field study project is on content marketing my role expanded beyond this so content marketing became only a small part of what I was doing. Instead, I was focusing on content marketing management, strategy, email marketing, Google ads and even some merchandising management, a real mixed bag!

I decided, in the end, to do a content analysis to determine how well the company's content fit into a content marketing framework; I began with De Plessis' 2015 content marketing framework as a basis for the coding schematic as well as my literature review on the use of core values to inform marketing strategy and used Ho et al. (2015) strategic content marketing framework to analyse the company's strategic content marketing process. In doing so I was attempting to explore how the company uses content marketing strategy to inform their content marketing creation and output and how do the core values of the brand inform the content marketing strategy. 

Many academics have outlined the need for consistent, quality content that aligns with the brand values, so while this case study did not set out to develop a new theory it did provide a rich and deep insight into how content marketing strategy works in the context of a fashion-tech start-up in its infancy.

I have enjoyed my time with this company and though I sometimes felt the breadth of work I took on was not totally relevant to my project, I did learn a lot that I believe will be useful in the next year of this master's and in my career.

Well done everyone on their field study, looking forward to the new semester already.

Slán go bhaile, Fiona Byrne