Katelyn Molloy

Katelyn Molloy is a marketing professional with skills in social media, content creating, photography, and web design. She is currently the Marketing Coordinator for Tito’s Burritos & Wings, a popular Northern Jersey restaurant chain. She applies her freshly honed technological skills to create social media marketing campaigns, bringing a new creative perspective to the company. She earned an Associates Degree through the Honors College at Brookdale Community College. In 2018, she transferred into The College of New Jersey where she is graduating with a Bachelor’s Degree in Interactive Multimedia (summa cum laude) and a minor in Communications Studies.

Thesis Overview

For my Senior Thesis Project, I combined my newfound interest in marketing with my interactive multimedia skill set in order to create a marketing campaign for Tito’s Burritos & Wings. This involved the design and launch of a new set of merchandise, filming and editing a “sizzle” video, and improving the restaurant website. While this adventure in marketing centered around three tasks to complete, there were always spontaneous challenges to handle and new projects evolving. COVID-19 made communication with my marketing team more complicated, and gathering content became much more difficult. Thankfully, through the use of social planning tools and group meeting applications like Zoom, I was able to complete my three major challenges; turning this Pandemic into a learning experience.

My Process

Merchandise

For the merchandise aspect of this project, I first conducted multiple surveys on Instagram and Twitter in order to gather an understanding of what clothing items our audience would be interested in purchasing. After narrowing down the results, I then began creating rough designs of those pieces using Photoshop so that I could provide my marketing team with a visual of the product in a few different styles. I also frequently collaborated with a colleague of the company named Brett Stolnick who would produce pricing estimates for all of the different designs and products. Although I initially planned to launch multiple items, some details of the project had to adapt to what was in the best interest of the company in terms of pricing and marketability. I learned very early on from my experience in the TCNJ IMM department, that this line of work requires creators to be able to utilize criticism in an efficient way to improve their work rather than getting deterred by it. So, in the end, we decided to re-print an older pattern on a new tie dye t-shirt, to create sunglasses for our younger demographic, and to move forward with the crewnecks that I have been designing. The merchandise art is still being finalized but I can't wait for them to launch potentially in the near future! Below is a peek at the potential crewneck:

Web Design

For the website aspect of this project, I specifically chose to focus on the creation of two new pages titled “Tito’s Tribe” and “Tito’s Team.” The “Tito’s Tribe” page will spotlight our “Tribe Member of the Month” which is essentially our employee of the month that is chosen based off of the nominations of the entire staff. The “Tito’s Team” page will then be our staff page which highlights each employee’s job title and photo. In order to start the process of producing these pages from scratch, I collaborated with our marketing colleague, Jimmy Page (the head of Hudson Creative) to get some feedback and guidance on the most efficient way to begin. Beyond these two pages, I am constantly involved in editing many different aspects of the company website and we are currently in the process of building a completely re-booted version of the current site. Our website provider is called BentoBox and I learned so much about this platform throughout this project. I have completed tasks such as editing code in order to help our ordering systems become more effective and I am currently working on updating all of the website photos to more recent shots. Due to the development site still being in progress, these pages are all still being built but below is a peek at what they will look like once the site is published:

Videography

For the videography aspect of this website, I was able to borrow equipment from the AIMM Cage in order to record more quality content which was necessary to create an effective promotional video. I filmed at all 5 restaurant locations but it was a challenge because with COVID- I was not able to get all of the shots that I had imagined. For example, I only had the equipment for a certain period of time and if the weather was poor on a shoot day, then I just had to make it work. Also due to the pandemic, I was not able to get shot of customers due to our indoor dining being closed still. However, I am still managed to gather interior shots of each location, exterior shots of each location, and some solid food shots. After sorting through all of the footage, I decided to make a minute and a half long compilation video (as seen above) documenting about 20 seconds of each location. I think that this captured the vibe and vision of each separate place while still tying them all together within one video. I edited completely in DaVinci Resolve and will be uploading this content to both our company Youtube page and our new website.

Reflection

Although everything did not play out precisely as I imagined, I still learned so much from this thesis project. I learned how to collaborate with merchandise companies, how to effectively design branded clothing, how to code/design within our BentoBox website platform, how to use photoshop more effectively, how to utilize criticism, how to more effectively collaborate with a team, how to use new camera equipment, how to roll with the punches, and how to not give up even when circumstances seem impossible. Persistence and self-compassion are key. Thank you for taking the time to read about my project!