Business & Government

Mays Marketing Students Partner With First Spirit Of Texas Festival

February 20, 2017

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By Grant Vassar, Texas A&M University Mays School of Business

The saying goes that everything is bigger in Texas, and in the case of the inaugural Spirit of Texas Festival, it couldn’t be any truer. The free festival aims to round up Guinness World Records in Aggieland for the largest serving of chili and Frito pie and largest Texas two-step.

That’s 5,000 pounds of chili and 4,000 boots.

To accomplish this feat, the festival has recruited Mays Business School’s Department of Marketing to help publicize the event, which will be March 2-5 at Wolf Pen Creek Park in College Station.

Ten Mays marketing students have worked with event organizer Cynthia Caronna to coordinate the festival’s social media, facilitate vendor relations and media partnerships and create a promotional magazine and other collateral. Caronna said she has been impressed by the hard work of the students. “This is truly giving back – building something that will outlive them,” she said. “It is a new tradition that will give them pride, much like the Aggie Ring does.”

In addition, the spring semester Services Marketing course, taught by Clinical Marketing Professor Janet Parish, will audit the entire 2017 event and provide recommendations for the 2018 Festival. She said this has been the largest-scale project marketing students have been involved in.

Pi Sigma Epsilon, a professional fraternity for students in marketing and sales management, advised by marketing faculty advisor Andrew Loring, has sold magazine ads and sponsorships for the event.

The event will also feature food trucks, a barbecue cook-off, a pie contest, car and bike shows, a marketplace of more than 200 antique and craft vendors, and live entertainment, and will benefit the Ronald McDonald House, Mobility Worldwide, K9s4Cops and other local charities.

For more information, go to https://sotfair.com/ or call 979-571-8891.

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This story by Grant Vassar was originally posted on Mays Impacts.

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