BERKELEY, Calif. – Amid the buzz and crowds of tabling at UC Berkeley, eyewitnesses on Tuesday reported Berkeley freshman Otis Jennings flying approximately ten feet in the air by Memorial Glade after being blown away by a combination of impressive consulting club promotions and extremely strong winds.
“I took one look at a canva-designed flier with the word ‘networking’ on it, and before I knew it, I was swept off my feet,” explained Jennings. “The sheer beauty of the Helvetica font, the minimalist shapes, and the plethora of company logos plastered on every inch of the flier spoke to me. The real kicker was when I saw the statuesque club tent barrel towards me at lightning speed, enveloping me with its glory and bringing me to dimensions (of business acumen) I’d never seen before.”
The implementation of such experiential marketing tactics has been meticulously planned in advance by consulting clubs for this semester’s recruitment cycle. Christy Mathis, a project manager at Launchpad Berkeley, shared her perspective:
“We realized that harassment wasn’t enough to attract applicants, despite our best efforts to inject some humanity into our glassy eyes and to stop profiling people based on whether or not they looked like the type of person to join a consulting club. Through our own market research, we found that experiential marketing would be most effective – think LaunchPad getting launched. So we purposefully chose to table on days forecasted with dangerously high winds to really create a three-dimensional marketing experience.”
Otis was one among many students getting physically launched into the air, as consulting clubs barricaded the winding side paths bordering the glade and Doe Library. At press time, the number of tents and human bodies had been steadily dwindling in the area.