HSE Students Work on Research Project for Arsenal

HSE master’s students in marketing met Anastasia Polozova, PR Director of Arsenal (National Centre for Contemporary Arts Volga-Vyatka region branch) and got started on a research project for the centre for contemporary art.

1st-year students of the master's programme in Marketing conduct research as part of the brand management course. The students work in small groups, and each group analyses and makes recommendations on brand development and interaction with the target audience. The presentation of preliminary results will take place in June.

The research for Arsenal is an interesting project for students as the culture and art campaigns are different from traditional marketing studies. One of the key challenges for students is to try to project their experience of using traditional marketing tools on to a creative industry.

I am sure that working with Arsenal will help our students to get a more varied and richer experience in marketing

Sergey Alexandrovskiy
Associate Professor at the Department of Marketing

This is a real project in which students of the ‘Marketing’ programme can practice their marketing, branding and communication skills while studying. Working with a real client is a complex process with lots of steps and details that students can learn only through experience. The students have already dealt with the meeting, briefing, work with secondary data, preliminary research and making a project plan. Now they will need to collect data, analyze it, make recommendations, prepare the report and present the results.

Anastasia Polozova, PR Director of Arsenal

‘I am very glad that Arsenal has begun working with students of the HSE master’s programme in Marketing. Since the opening of the new wing of Arsenal after restoration in 2011 and in the run-up to the opening of the entire building in May 2015, our PR department worked on increasing the number of visitors. Our slogan is ‘Arsenal is open for everyone!’ And in 2016 we managed to increase attendance fourfold (six-fold for the exhibitions).   And now we are trying to differentiate our work in accordance to different groups of visitors.

It's important for us to determine the needs and interests, choose the right type of communication and make an attractive offer for each group. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough resources to solve this problem right now, as our employees deal with a lot of events and they have to immerse themselves in a lot of projects. We look forward to fruitful cooperation with HSE students, now we plan to conduct several surveys and audience research. In the future we plan to implement some projects aimed at different groups of visitors’.

Zhanna Klementieva, 1st-year student of the Marketing programme

‘I have to admit that Arsenal has always been a mystery to me. It is associated with contemporary art, a field that not many people accept and understand. How should we communicate with the existing audience and how can we attract new visitors – these are the questions that interest us as researchers. The task set by the museum marketing experts is complex and topical, but I really like it.

It is also nice to know that the first meeting with the clients was led by our lecturer Sergey Alexandrovskiy. It really helped us to focus on the agenda and made it look more serious’.

Sergey Alexandrovskiy, Academic Supervisor of the programme in Marketing

‘Arsenal is really interested in the project. During our first meeting with Anastasia Polozova we discussed the ways to cooperate and determined the problems that we can solve with the students here and now. I am sure that working with Arsenal will help our students to get a more varied and richer experience in marketing.  I hope that our friendship with the centre for contemporary art will develop into new projects from Arsenal for our students’.