After members of the Missouri Students Association found two Tiger Plan advertisements misleading, the association plans to work with Campus Dining Services to change the plan’s marketing techniques.
Campus and Community Relations Chairman Hunter Windholz met with CDS Marketing Director Mike Wuest Nov. 4 to confirm MSA’s involvement with Tiger Plan marketing moving forward. CDS released two advertisements before it agreed to meet with MSA and change its marketing techniques.
“One of their advertisements was quotes from students using their plan that were stressing how students really love to eat at places like the Student Center,” Windholz said. “That isn’t what the plan is for at all. I reached out to Mike, and he assured me that those were posts from their original marketing plan.”
Windholz and Wuest discussed new marketing techniques for the plan that emphasize the specific students who will benefit from the plan. CDS now has data from two surveys sent out to Tiger Plan users this year.
“We received a variety of responses with an overall positive score,” CDS Director Julaine Kiehn said.
According to the latest CDS survey results, The Shack is the most frequented dining location Tiger Plan users swipe at.
The Shack is an a-la-carte location. For users of the Tiger Plan to save money on the plan, they need to eat at a-la-carte locations for only 17 percent of their meals. CDS will release the rest of its survey data to MSA on Nov. 18. Windholz is planning to meet with Wuest before then to discuss changes to CDS’ marketing.
“I’m going to show him what I don’t like about it, and hopefully in that meeting we can start to talk about the kind of ads that we want to see and remind them, once again, of their claimed target audience,” Windholz said.
In September, the presidents of the Residence Halls Association and MSA both said they raised their concerns about the Tiger Plan to CDS in meetings with Kiehn, but that their initial feedback was not taken into consideration.
“Our ultimate concern to begin with was that they were marketing it towards general students that just want to eat anywhere,” Windholz said. “The whole point of the Tiger Plan is to eat majority of their meals at the all-you-care-to-eat dining halls. We feel that that wasn’t being expressed clearly and that that was messing up a lot of students.”
_Edited by Emily Gallion | egallion@themaneater.com_