Riding Around in the Geico Car
As I embark on this real world journey at the local Geico office in Wynnewood, my experience is teaching me leadership and communication skills. My position is Marketing Intern, and I am responsible for a variety of duties, the biggest duty–to promote our special dealership program to local car dealerships.
Each week my fellow intern, Greta, and I visit local car dealerships to notify sales representatives of this program. This is a referral program where if a sales representative at a car dealership is selling a car, and he/she refers his/her client to Geico, the representative will get $25 just for the referral. This deal includes an American Express gift card, which will be mailed to him/her. Greta and I have gone to multiple dealerships from South Philly to Westchester in the past few weeks. Greta drives us around in the Geico car, and we have a list of dealerships in a particular area we visit. We typically spend about four hours or so on the road. Driving the car is critical in our internship because it allows for guerilla marketing. We also put together some goodies from Geico for each car dealership including a Geico branded cup, stress balls, a coozie, pens, and a stuffed gecko. After we collect business cards from various sales representatives from the dealerships, we have to enter the information into an Excel spreadsheet. This allows a neat and formatted way to view client information.
As interns, we are the ones in charge of this special dealership program. It is a fun way to execute marketing in a real world setting. We typically collect fifteen to thirty business cards per day. The more we collect the more accomplished we feel. This task is a good way to exercise our communication and sales skills because we have to talk to sales representatives, whom we don’t know, and convince them that our dealership program is important and beneficial. This program also is a great way for car dealerships to help us, the local Geico office, while we help them. I’m learning a lot through this program and know that the more people with whom we speak, the more I develop and improve my communication skills.
I think this is a really interesting and cool internship for a college student. It’s super different and I can imagine how much you’re learning. It’s important to learn how to get out of your comfort zone and talk business to people, especially in the Advertising world. This is great practice for that and it’s also nice how you get to be in different places- must be nice to have a change of scenery versus sitting in a cubicle staring at a computer screen all day. Good luck with the rest of the semester!
Your internship sounds really hands-on and interesting. It’s definitely not your traditional office internship–I don’t think many of us are living the life of a traveling salesman! But it’s great because no matter what you’re planning to do with your experience, the communication skills and powers of persuasion that you are gaining will be applicable practically everywhere. It may not always be glamorous, but I can tell that you are definitely going to be learning some valuable lessons and gaining real-world street smarts.