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Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Cal Lutheran Professor: Keep Truckin’

Experiential learning – those popular buzz words in academia – explain a new marketing phenomenon at California Lutheran University. Earlier this month, more than 100 students from the Thousand Oaks university participated in the second Mobile Retail event of the school year. The one-day event brought retail trucks to campus for an outdoor market, with students helping to publicize it. The goal? To teach students how to plan and market an event from inception to completion. “It’s a great experience for the students,” said Sarah Fischbach, an assistant marketing professor at Cal Lutheran who organized the event. “I preach all the time how important aesthetics is when marketing and developing a product, and when (students) see that product firsthand it really helps.” The university partnered with the American Mobile Retail Association in Los Angeles to bring the event to fruition, inviting about 10 trucks from the association to participate. On March 10, an assortment of apparel, craft, book and other retailers gathered along Memorial Drive and Regent and Pioneer avenues, where Fischbach said hundreds of students, staff and members of the community stormed the trucks during the day. Fischbach’s students were responsible for marketing the event via social media and getting the word out to peers and the community. “Most schools now are big on experiential learning, not just theories and ideas. We’re having a big push toward entrepreneurship in our program and I think this event embraces the goals of the university,” Fischbach said. Retailers included Yarnover Truck, a San Fernando Valley-based yarn store on wheels; Jennifer Lauren Boutique, a women’s apparel retailer in Hermosa Beach; L.A.’s Wear on Wheels, which specializes in styling and image consulting; Ginger’s Booty, a thrift and craft boutique in Rancho Cucamonga; California Limited, an L.A. graphics T-shirt designer; and the Library Store on Wheels, which sells goods with a portion of proceeds going to support the Los Angeles Public Library. Mobile retail is a growing trend in the industry, according to Stacey Steffe, founder of AMRA. With minimal overhead and the ability to bring products directly to consumers, entrepreneurs are finding that the business model is financially attractive and less risky. “A large majority of mobile retailers focus (solely) on the trucks and e-commerce, though some do go into brick and mortar,” Steffe explained. “A lot of people will use the truck business to generate the revenue and capital they need to open a brick-and-mortar (location), though I’ve also seen brick-and-mortar businesses close to go into mobile retail.” – Champaign Williams

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