Creating relationships at GEICO
The time is flying by and a great deal has happened during my time as an intern for the local office of GEICO. As the marketing/media intern I really get to do a little bit of everything in the office. My desire going into this internship was to learn more of the ins and outs of client side in advertising. This has definitely happened during my time as an intern. In the office I have really learned how to build and create business relationships.
This relationship building is seen through the Dealership Program that the office holds. The program helps to build the relationship of the local GEICO office with the many car dealerships in the Philadelphia area. Once a week, myself and another intern Kailey, drive around in the GEICO branded Scion and head to different areas around Philadelphia. We have been in suburbs such as Springfield or even near the Philadelphia Airport at the Philadelphia Auto Mall. During that time we meet the faces of the different dealerships and let them know about our program. We also give them some free GEICO collateral such as branded cups, pens, stress balls, koosies, and even stuffed Geckos! We gave everyone of the sales agents a small flyer about how the program works as well as a business card for after hour insurance quote needs. The program offers a cash reward to any sales agent at the dealership who refers one of their customers to our local office. We explain this opportunity to the different sales people in exchange for a business card filled with pertinent information needed about them. We then take this information and put it into a database to be ready for when the sales person refers a customer to the local office. This information helps to send them e-mail reminders and make the process of getting their gift card reward to them quickly and efficiently.
Some of the side projects we have had were creating ads for the office which needed to be used in media outlets on campus. The local office has a new student discount aimed directly for Temple Students and I was tasked with creating the ad to be run in our student newspaper, The Temple News. I got to make edits to a full page and online skyscraper banner ad, which will be featured in the Music Issue. Even though I’m in school for account management it was exciting to get an experience to not only use my selling skills to push for a larger ad but also be creative and use Photoshop to alter the full page ad to suit the student discount and newspaper. Every little bit of learning will make my career in account management that much better as I can see more from everyone’s point of view.
