Sergio Eduardo Pérez Gaona | Professional Master in Digital Marketing and Communication

2 November 2022

Among the most exciting projects of the Professional Master in Digital Marketing and Communication is the opportunity to create an actual website. A valuable opportunity to combine theoretical notions and concrete skills, developing project management processes useful in various contexts under the guidance of specialised lecturers. We asked some Alumni to tell us about this experience. Here is what Sergio Eduardo Pérez Gaona told us.

During your Master’s in Digital Marketing and Communication in BBS, you attended the course in Digital Platforms Laboratory led by Professor Roberto Ciacci and created your website project hosted by Siteground. What was the idea behind the project? Can you tell us about your experience?

Of course, this was one of my favorite projects. Personally I’ve always been very much into entrepreneurship and this was the cherry of the pie for me. This project was first planned to be an extension of an e-commerce I was running back in Mexico. where I was buying products from Hong Kong and then reselling them into a famous LATAM marketplace. The idea of not depending 100% on this marketplace to make business made me realize that this project had to be a possible solution to amplify my sales channels. So that’s how this project started.

Developing a website involves analysis and choices in the front end and back end. Beyond that, there are aspects related to the logic of content and its relationship to marketing objectives. What insights did the course in Digital Platforms Laboratory offer you in this direction?

This course made us understand how a website works by making us live in first person the way WordPress thinks and the variety of solutions that you can find to make logical content related to marketing objectives. Actually, this course was perfect to apply many other acquired knowledge from the different courses we got in the Digital Marketing and Communication Master. In the end, the website synthesizes everything such as communication, traditional marketing techniques, SEO, and everything that we get to learn in the course. All applied to this project. 

During the development of your project, you have gone through phases of design and revision, noting that the starting idea may change according to the chosen purpose. How did you approach this aspect of design?

Of course the idea changed a lot. I had many doubts about what I saw in several e-commerce fashion shops. At the beginning I reached a chinese dropshipping platform that had medium to low quality items for my disposal. So making a benchmark with websites that sell these products was my first choice, but suddenly I got an opportunity to make a deal with some Italian dropshipping company to sell products of luxury fashion brands. Then luxury brands were my goal visually speaking. And it was a different way to communicate visually through my website. Even if it’s fashion we are talking about, by making detailed benchmarks you can clearly note two different ways of presenting themselves and therefore two different user experiences to be approached depending on the path you choose.

Creating, managing, and nurturing a Website is a constant effort that must always be related to all aspects of the business to represent a consistent and reliable image of the company itself. This relationship between business processes and web image is linked in many ways to your path in BBS. What are the main insights that the Master’s program you attended offered you from this point of view?

Indeed constant effort is what it takes because the digital world we are living in just makes everything run at 1000%. If some brand in the industry is making changes, the rest is applying them into their brands, or proposing new ways of doing. During the master’s we had several courses where we saw real life cases in which for example luxury brands decided to create and offer to their clients cheaper products. We saw that in some cases this wasn’t a pro but a con because their clients got the perception that the brand wasn’t anymore exclusive and the brand wasn’t anymore reliable to their minds. Clients thought they had something unique and then they were part of a brand that wasn’t anymore like that.

By saying this business revenue goals need to be evaluated very carefully with the image of a company, more over if the companies have a long and known story. In summary companies should implement what is best for them in both business and image worlds.

Do you have opportunities in your current career to leverage the techniques and skills learned during your web project development? What are the strengths of this course relative to your career field?

I’m managing a multilingual e-commerce company that sells merchandising. This project development opened me a door I always wanted to know. Before this master I knew how to sell online in marketplaces. As said before, learning WordPress amplified my knowledge on how to implement new sales channels for my personal purposes or for the company’s I’m working for. I think theory is always very important, but this course being a project development made me get the theory and apply it in real world cases. So it gives you strength to know what you are doing, what you can do, and what you also need to ask for help if it’s programming for example, that in my precise case I don’t know. I’d say for my business intentions this project works perfectly.

The topic of website development fits within the Master’s program in Digital Marketing and Communication. How do you relate this particular topic to the others covered within the Master’s program?

From my point of view this covers practically everything. I applied marketing techniques form professors Scarpi and Repezza into the products I offered, accounting lessons from professor Visani and Raffoni for making a business plan, cross cultural lessons to identify how to speak to my market and to negotiate with suppliers, Excel sheets to make promotions or identify unit profit margin for specific products, communication and storytelling from professors Grandi and Valeriani to provoke something to my potential customers through communication.

So from my point of view this covers what I was looking for, to get a big scenario of Digital Marketing and all that is involved theoretically and practically. It’s not just doing things for business, but knowing what you are doing and this master helped me a lot in that sense. This surely amplified my vision.