Evansville Lodge gets Marketing Lift

The Oak Meadow Lodge is a quiet haven on Evansville's picturesque north side. Everyone who stays raves about the accommodations and the nearby amenities at Oak Meadow Country Club. But until recently, Oak Meadow Lodge was a well kept secret.

New owner Lynne Lewis approached the Southwestern Indiana SBDC desperate for marketing advice. Unfortunately, she had no budget for marketing and advertising. That when the SBDC contacted a marketing professor at the University of Southern Indiana.

Lisa Wiltsie was thrilled with the idea of giving her marketing students a real world experience. She divided her class into teams and Lewis gave them a $1,000 budget in which to work. That kind of limitation certainly forced the students to get creative!

Six teams of students spent an entire semester on the project. First they did market research. One team sent representatives with surveys to restaurants, stores, and malls all around town. They asked respondents if they were from Evansville and if so, had they ever heard of Oak Meadow Lodge. The results shocked Lewis. “Although I knew our name wasn’t really out there, I didn’t know how NOT out there it was!”

The student team then set to work on marketing strategy. There were dozens of ideas, some reasonable and some not. But Lewis is putting several of them into action. “I’d never even thought about a bus sign. Who hasn’t been at a stoplight and read the side of a bus?” Lewis also gathered some suggestions about building relationships with Evansville’s sports teams, caterers and event planners. One student team also had many good ideas about building word of mouth advertising by giving discounts to those who make referrals.

Oak Meadow Lodge is still a quiet get away on the north side, but there are far fewer empty rooms these days!