Drucker School grads, professor honored by IDEA and Core 77 Awards for marketing and growth plan

Two recent graduates and a professor from Claremont Graduate University’s Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management have been recognized by the 2012 International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) for their work developing a marketing and growth plan for a Southern California public radio station.

Recent graduates Nicholas Fusso and Heather Hoopes and Professor Hideki Yamawaki were members of a team that won a Bronze Award in the Design Strategy category in the annual competition, which celebrates design excellence in products, sustainability, interaction design, packaging, strategy, research, and concepts. The trio partnered on the project and contest entry with colleagues from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

The team created a marketing and growth strategy for 89.3 FM KPCC, Southern California Public Radio. The plan focused on how the station can increase listenership and maintain a long-term competitive advantage, turning non-listeners into listeners, listeners into members, and members into donors.

The International Design Excellence Awards are organized by the Industrial Designers Society of America. Out of 660 finalists for the contest, 35 were honored with Gold Awards, while 71 received Silver Awards, and 123 merited Bronze Awards.

Judging criteria focused on eight areas of industrial design excellence: innovation; benefit to the user; benefit to society; benefit to the client; visual appeal and appropriate aesthetics; usability, emotional factors and unmet needs for the design research category; and internal factors, methods, strategic value and implementation for the design strategy category.

In addition to the IDEA Award, the team’s KPCC growth plan was noted for its excellence by the 2012 Core 77 Awards in the Strategy & Research category.

Hoopes and Fusso both graduated with MBAs from Claremont Graduate University in May. Yamawaki serves at the Drucker School’s Ito Chair of International Business. They worked on the project as part of Yamawaki’s MBA course, MGT341: Creating Competitive Advantage through Design Thinking.