Internship in the Area of Marketing and Campaigns

There are various reasons. For one thing, I am from Schwelm, which is very near Wuppertal – in other words, a region in which Vorwerk is very well known. Because we have been very enthusiastic users of Vorwerk products in my family for generations, I also wanted to become acquainted with Vorwerk as an employer. Secondly, Kobold products have often been recognized for their quality, which makes the job very exciting from a professional point of view. Finally, I am excited by the opportunity to gain some insight into Vorwerk’s direct sales organization.

Because I think there are many interesting and exciting interfaces between sales and marketing. I dealt with this already during my course of study and now I can experience in practice just how closely both areas are interlinked at Vorwerk. The direct sales organization here is unlike just about any other sales organization in Germany.

I already dealt in depth with social media campaigns in my master’s thesis. I’m fascinated by the way in which many different factors must interact in order to produce a really successful campaign – and the opportunity to make a creative contribution and show initiative is appealing. It’s this variety in my work day that makes the internship so interesting for me.

My work day gets off to a very relaxed start at around eight o'clock in the morning, whereby I’m not a slave to the clock because even as an intern I benefit from flextime at Vorwerk. However, that is also pretty much the end of the routine part. Once I start work, my day is almost always different and consists of a mix of meetings, initial projects of my own, some administrative tasks, but also many creative tasks in the area of promotion and campaigns. There, among other things, I am able to provide support in the development of campaign elements and, for example, create suitable claims, texts or visuals. In addition, I have already been permitted to support my colleagues at some out-of-office appointments, such as shooting new product videos. The great thing is that I am largely permitted to self-manage my work and am free to organize my tasks so I am able to work on them in a calm and focused manner.

The thing I like best is working in a team, and also the fact that I am able to assume responsibility for small projects of my own already during the first few months. It’s exciting to see how you can make things happen and that a couple of things are also actually implemented. If I were to emphasize one other thing, it would be the meetings here at Vorwerk – because they give me yet again a very different sense of teamwork. During my course of study, some group projects left me more irritated than anything else. Here, by contrast, I notice that we actually make progress in meetings and develop something together.

You definitely have repeated opportunities to display your talent. Thanks to the diverse tasks, you can learn a lot, both on the creative and the analytical side. I personally also immediately had the feeling I was a full member of the team. Above all, the constructive nature of the feedback I receive shows me that my ideas are not only noticed, but are also taken seriously.

As far as expertise is concerned: in an internship, you rapidly realize which things you learned at university are applicable to everyday working life and which were more theoretical in nature. Nevertheless, what you have learned is, of course, helpful when it comes to categorizing tasks better and faster.

Yes, I think it did, although I couldn’t identify any specific contents. At university, they taught us how to approach complex tasks and solve problems in a structured manner. Now this is frequently helpful to me in everyday working life.

Absolutely – lived up to and exceeded them. To be quite honest, I didn’t count on joining such a modern team. With catchwords like “tradition” and “family owned company”, innovation isn’t necessarily the first thing that comes to mind. But there’s no reason why cooperation can’t be both cordial and highly professional and innovative.

For me, it has definitely confirmed that I chose the right course of study and focusing on marketing and campaigns is also incredibly fun for me in practice. However, the most important realization for me is that my future doesn’t depend on a specific sphere of responsibility in which I want to work, but on the team around me instead. During my course of study, I more or less excluded the topic of “customer relationship management”, but because of the working method of the team responsible for it here, I realize that I could imagine working in this area after all.

Profile: After graduating from secondary school, Anna-Lena Sodies studied communications and media management (B.Sc.) in Iserlohn and went on to specialize in marketing in the business management course of study (M.Sc.) at the University of Münster. Already during her course of study, together with fellow students, she advised small fashion startups in the fields of marketing and sales and completed several internships, among other things in a major marketing agency. Until July, 2019, Anna-Lena is undergoing a 6-month internship in the campaigns and promotion marketing team at Kobold.