University of Sunderland students help boost local businesses with marketing support service

A group of marketing students from the city's university have been providing local businesses with a free consultancy service to help them boost their customer engagement.

Working with the University’s Marketing Hub, a facility that brings together students, businesses and marketing academics to work on real-life marketing projects, 22 local businesses have successfully collaborated with 116 students since May 2023. 

The Marketing Hub provides a range of business support services including audits, planning and strategy, communications, social media, digital opportunities, branding and consumer behaviour.

Through the Marketing Hub, businesses meet with student teams to identify potential areas of business development. The students then worked together to create an improvement proposal for the business to implement.

Among the businesses to benefit was social enterprise consultants in Houghton-le-Spring, Social Enterprise Acumen CIC, Port Independent Coffee Shop, Warriors Gym, Honest Utility Group and Vets4Pets.

Adam Chorlton, project manager at Social Enterprise Acumen CIC, said: “Working with the University of Sunderland Marketing Hub was an extremely beneficial process. Communication was open and every step was sign-posted.

"The students who worked on our project were creative, intuitive, and showed genuine enthusiasm for the work. I would happily work with the Marketing Hub team again.”

All the students work and advice was overseen by University’s professional business and marketing academics, most of whom have many years of practical industry and commercial experience.

Marketing hub manager, Carol Stoker, said: "The Marketing Hub has a dual role within both the University and local business community and acts in the same way as any commercial agency. 

"From the students’ perspective, the Marketing Hub offers an opportunity to gain experience and develop their employability skills by working on a range of live projects, whilst the business community can gain access to the full complement of marketing and business consultancy services at no cost to themselves.”

The Marketing Hub is based in the University’s Reg Vardy Centre on St Peter’s Campus. For more information, or to submit a business enquiry, email: [email protected]