Laura Fletcher IMC 642

Header from the "mystery box" product page on Universal Standard. What is up with the name “Universal Standard”? The ecommerce site Universal Standard is a women’s fashion startup founded in 2015 by entrepreneurs Polina Veksler and Alexandra Waldman. It started with a mission of offering “modern essentials” first in sizes 10 to 28, then 6 to 32, and next—by 2019—in sizes 00 to 40. The cofounders wear different sizes, one plus-size and the other conventional, and they were upset that they could rarely shop for clothes at the same store. Thus, the store’s mission focuses on being size-inclusive with the philosophy, “we won’t stop until we bring fashion for all women up to a Universal Standard” (Universal Standard, n.d.a)—and scale their medium to a size 18, the midpoint of their range as well as the average U.S. woman’s size (see fig. 1).  Figure 1: A graph of "the average size in America" corresponds to the brand's sizing conventions (Universal Standard, n.d.b). ...

If I may toot my own horn, I am a content queen. I can write well, manage a marketing communications team, and create a solid strategic plan. Unfortunately, this expertise can make me want to jump into the deep end of new integrated marketing and communications topics…without a life vest. Now that I’m soaking wet from a course on website analytics and SEO, I realize that Semrush can be a great tool to guide a SEO newbie—even an experienced one, ahem—who wants to learn everything but needs a step-by-step guide to do the research, set benchmarks, and draw conclusions.  Figure 1: Edited version of the "clean all the things" meme (Brosh, 2010).   I was a hare, and it was time to be a patient tortoise. They’re better swimmers anyway. As a WVU Reed College student I’m given temporary access to the powerful (and ordinarily expensive) search engine marketing tool Semrush, so I began following their training as I tried out various features. Semrush Academy, as it bills itself, provi...

Photo of Lagusta Yearwod by Matt Petricone (Schaerlaeckens, 2016).    For a marketing communications professional, social media can make you feel like a kid in a candy shop. So many platforms, and within them so many features and trends to use for content, and on the backend so many tools to integrate with your website and spin out data for analytics. However, overindulgence in social media is a real problem, and though you may not get a stomachache from overeating bon-bons, you can overspend in both time and budget.  When marketing for a business, starting off by understanding the business’s goals, its competition (and general industry trends), and the merits of each social media platform, a marketer can select a small handful of platforms on which to focus their energy and their dollar. To stay with the candy shop theme, the example business in this post is Lagusta’s Luscious , a vegan chocolatier that has a few retail shops in New York and does vigorous online shipping...