Are fruit snacks candy? While the internet continues debating that question, General Mills hopes that their own fruity gummy product Gushers will secure a more prominent space in candy aisles and in the minds of Gen Z snackers. To accomplish their goal, General Mills turned the challenge over to students at the BYU Marriott School of Business.
Emilee Anselmo, Carson Bond, Devin Driskill, Sefakor Esiape, and Jamie Lewis worked with General Mills as part of an on-campus internship through the BYU Marriott Business Career Center.
“An on-campus internship is a chance to take the learning outside of the classroom and into the real world,” says Driskill, a junior from Minneapolis, Minnesota. He enjoyed completing another on-campus internship a previous semester, and he wanted to further boost his resume and prepare to apply for the marketing program by working with General Mills.
The company asked the team of student interns to gather insights and consult the company about how to better market Gushers as candy to Gen Z consumers. “General Mills was open to any ideas for how to get Gushers into the candy aisle,” Driskill says. The ambiguity of the semester-long project meant that the students relied on their weekly meetings to set objectives and coordinate plans.
The team prioritized research first, and they began where they knew they could find Gen Z. Scouring TikTok and Instagram, conducting focus groups in the Wilkinson Student Center, and calling up friends are some of the ways that Esiape says the team gathered data and insights about consumers’ perceptions of Gushers.
“We were given the opportunity to just be on the ground with marketing work,” Esiape says. At the start of the internship, Esiape, from Ghana, was already enrolled in the marketing program and eager to work on a marketing project for a Fortune 500 company. “This was right up my alley—the surveys, the analytics, the consumer insights.”
After gathering data, the team worked to formulate suggestions for General Mills. Bond, from Highland, Utah, says that the goal-setting groundwork the team laid in the beginning of the semester helped them be more prepared to run smoothly toward the end of the project. “When we had to make those tough decisions about what to suggest, we felt confident knowing that we already put in the research and effort rather than just leaning on our opinions.”
The team presented their suggestions, such as altering the packaging and utilizing social-media influencers, to a panel of representatives from General Mills. “With such a big company like General Mills, you expect them to have so many people working on these types of projects,” Esiape says, “but they really valued our insights.” In the months since finishing the internship, the team saw the company implement some of their suggestions.
Like the General Mills representatives, the students also walked out of their presentation with new insights. “Probably the most underrated benefit from an on-campus internship is getting really, really good at writing and presenting, because you’re being put in front of real, actual companies,” Driskill says.
The experience working on real business problems helped Bond secure more career opportunities. “After my internship with General Mills, I started getting traction in my interviews and building out my resume,” Bond says. With a General Mills internship on his resume, Bond was accepted into the marketing program along with his teammates Driskill and Lewis.
“Most of us were pre-business students at the time of the internship,” Bond says. “But the fact that General Mills was able to trust us and give us the freedom to work on valuable projects comes down to them knowing the types of principles instilled in us as students at BYU Marriott.”