I am not sure why there is not something more on a local level that better connects businesses with college students with specific attention paid to the interests of the college student. I am envisioning a web-service that allows local business people to post specials by the hour according to the student preference. For example, if a local bar was barely receiving any business on a particular night they could post on the website that they were having a three-hour special of all you could drink beer for $X. This would allow for the bar to better control their flow of customers in a bar while giving the students an excellent value and option for the night.

Another use for this application would be to better control inventory in a store or restaurant. If I am the owner of a clothing store and I just got in the new shipment of clothes and had a bunch of leftovers, I could post on the website that I had these available sizes and it would get posted on the website.

For the actual model of the website, think a combination of http://jellyfish.com and http://digg.com. Jellyfish.com is a website which has a selling feature where an item has to go and the price gets lowered by the minute until the item is sold out. The website could have the option for such an auction of an item, but it would be on more of a local scale and might require the user to actually go to the store in their local area. It would relate to Digg.com by allowing user input to say whether this was a good deal or not, bad deals would get ‘buried’ and would not be shown to other users (which would address the issues of just using the website as an advertisement) while good deals would get pulled to the top for the user.

This service does not need to be limited to college students, but I know that as a member of Gen Y that the idea would be well perceived over the internet or a desktop widget because of the massive amount of hours that we spend connected to the internet. These are just some thoughts on a service that could be used to better connect students with businesses. Most of these thoughts are rough, but the underlying concept of having a service that better connects businesses to college students by advertising to their direct interests is something that could be very successful while benefiting the customer and businesses.

| Generation-Y wants, Marketing to college students, Marketing to young women, Open Innovation, New Concepts & Ideas, Managing Generation Y | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

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