A Visit to Skapa and The University

Skapa Presentation

We started off the day by making a visit to Skapa Digital Media, which is a social media advertising company. We met with Erik Ekholm, the CEO of the company. He was very generous and took out time in his day to give us a presentation on his company and social media advertising and marketing. He had a very nice spread of food and drinks for us and we all really appreciated it! Erik gave us his presentation in their conference room which is far smaller than the normal conference rooms in Chicago. Skapa is actually a pretty small company with only 7 employees and 2 interns, so having a small conference room makes sense. The office space was absolutely beautiful. It was so modern and contemporary with just enough decorations and color to make the office feel cozy and comfortable, but still a place to be able to get work done.

Office space at Skapa

The presentation Erik gave to us was very nice and I learned a lot. He knew so many different facts about social media and how it has evolved to being a major source for advertising. In this day and age social media is changing rapidly and people don't have a very long attention span. Skapa is a business to business marketing company instead of retail marketing it is . Erik made an interesting comment saying that the 4 P's of marketing are irrelevant and it is now the 4 C's of marketing that are important. The 4 P's are price, promotion, place, and product. The 4 C's are create, curate, connect, and cultivate. Interestingly enough, Skapa actually means "create" in Swedish. Erik was very interesting to listen to because he had so many insightful ideas. Instead of thinking web first for advertising you have to think mobile first. Everyone has a phone and everyone is on their phone and checking their phone every couple of seconds. The new place to advertise is now mobile. 

Quotes From Skapa:

"Driving sales with social media"

"Marketing is about understanding the needs of your target groups and giving hem relevant content"

Lecture at Gothenburg University

For lunch we ate at the cafe at the University of Gothenburg. The food options were not very varied and everything was mostly some kind of seafood. Overall the food options were pretty limited compared to our college. Everyone at the University in the cafe was dressed nicely. I would say they were all in business casual. In general they were all dressed much nicer than people at our college do. There was no one dressed in sweatpants, they all looked very presentable. After lunch we got a private lecture from Professor Alvstam who teaches international business. We also got to hear from Martin Oberg who was a professor of marketing. From our lecture we learned that Sweden was one of the poorest countries in the late 19th century. By the 21st century it had become one of the richest countries in Europe. To obtain this complete turn around, Sweden succeeded by early internationalization. 

Daily Reflections:

• Swedes are very modest people and they always say that their English is not good when it is actually close to perfect
• Students attending the university here are a couple of years older than typical college students in the United States because their schooling is a little longer than ours
• the cinnamon rolls here are addictive