Students unveil marketing plans

City of Maryville and local economic development officials, including Mayor Glenn Jonagan and City Manager Greg McDanel, glimpsed what they hope will be a more profitable future for Mozingo Lake Wednesday during a "branding" presentation by senior advertising and digital media majors from Northwest Missouri State University.

Members of Jacquie Lamer's advanced advertising strategies class were asked early this fall to come up with a unified plan for publicizing the 3,000-acre park and golf course, which Jonagan and other council members believe has potential as a regional recreation destination.

After working for three months, the students made their pitch this week during an hour-long session at the Maryville Community Center.

Jonagan and others were clearly impressed with the slick, Madison Avenue-style presentation.

Working in pairs, the dozen-member Northwest team began by citing a recent study by IDM Group, which was hired by the city to determine the feasibility of building a lakeside hotel. The IDM report bluntly described the city's current marketing efforts as amateurish, unfocused and diluted.

For example, the student team noted, different activities at Mozingo — golf, fishing and the like — are represented by eight very different logos. Other advertising and marketing, such as it is, comprises a hodgepodge of websites and social media efforts filled with broken links, indifferent photography and outdated information.

In practice, Mozingo doesn't really even have an official name, and is variously called "Mozingo," "Mozingo Lake," "Mozingo Lake Park" and "Mozingo Lake Golf Course."

To remedy these problems, Lamer's students proposed two similar branding campaign options for what would uniformly be called "Mozingo Lake Recreation Area."

The new name, always presented with the words "Mozingo Lake" in large, capital letters, is to be incorporated into a unified set of logos and graphic designs that would become the basis of a new website and Facebook page, among other avenues for public awareness.

Students also proposed similarly themed advertisements, billboards, brochures, business cards, promotional souvenirs and letterheads.

Other plans call for increased use of online directories like visitmo.com and golfdigest.com and an updated presence on Google Maps, Mapquest and the Garmin GPS system.

During the course of their market research, the students decided that Mozingo should be marketed primarily to golfers, RV campers and anglers, a demographic, they said, that contains a lot of crossover in terms of disposable income and recreational preferences.

They estimated that a locally targeted advertising and rebranding effort focused on print, billboards, digital, and broadcast media, excluding television because of its high cost, could net the park an additional $40,000 in revenue.

About $24,000 of that would be used to pay for the campaign, leaving a net profit of around $16,000.