The Kerry Ramsay Post Grad PR Patented Mall Crawl

All hell breaks loose when 30+ students conduct a scavenger hunt in the Quinte Mall. What started as a simple, eye-opening exercise on how there are many examples of Public Relations (PR) in our lives that most of us don’t even realize, ended in confusion and aggravation. Confusion and aggravation, two emotions expressed by not only fellow students but mall security as well.

I was in a group of four students. The objective, to answer a questionnaire based on a specific set of PR elements within the Quinte Mall. Not twenty minutes in, to this hour long PR exercise, my group was stopped by mall security. The guard thought we were soliciting or pestering employees in some way. On the contrary, we were merely keeping to ourselves, for the most part, with our list of questions, only we as a group could answer.

Nevertheless, we were stopped by this guard. Even after explaining to him our purpose for having a pen and paper in our hands, he tried to make us stay where we were while he located our professor. Funny how mall security essentially wanted us to loiter in front of Roots. We told him that we were one of seven groups of students in the mall doing an AUTHORIZED exercise. When asked who authorized this exercise, we told him our professor and mall management.

Instead of contacting management, utilizing the radio attached to his hip, he informed us to stay where we were while he attempted to locate our professor. To honour his demands we stayed for close to ten minutes, even though he informed us he would be back in two-to-five minutes. We eventually left and continued our hunt for our answers and ultimately the prize for being the first team to complete the task.

These ten minutes set us back; we would have won! We were down to two questions before the winning team was announced. Those two questions would have taken approximately two-to-five minutes to answer and return to our professor.

But I digress. Outside of the obvious ridiculousness my group and I found ourselves in, this exercise was actually fun and educational. We learned that there are examples of PR and Integrated Marketing Campaigns (IMC) everywhere in our daily lives and that PR should be an integral part in any advertising campaign.

Then again, we already knew that, didn’t we! I love this program!

The Post Grad PR Patented Mall Crawl. Try saying that ten times fast!