Reflection

For this assignment I was asked to choose a company and research what they stand for, their main objectives, and what kind of company they were. I chose the Oklahoma Blood Institute because I am currently an intern there and I know what they do and why it is so important for them to have good branding and recognition within our state. Another component of what we were asked to do was to find competitors of our chosen organizations and compare and contrast what rival companies are doing better or worse. Because OBI is the only place in Oklahoma that collects and supplies blood to medical facilities, I compared what they do to what blood institutes in other states are doing. I discovered that the Texas Blood Institute must be linked to OBI in some way because they share marketing materials and the same mission statement.

I was very interested in this assignment at first because I love working with OBI and an opportunity to learn more about what they do is very exciting. Because I am already supposed to know what they stand for I researched more into what else they do besides blood drives. It was very interesting for me to find out that OBI has been very influential in developing antigens for some serious and sometimes fatal diseases. I was kind of sad that they do not have any direct competitors though so I wasn’t able to do a real competitor analysis like some of my other classmates may have done. But I finding out that because of OBI, Oklahoma is one of the only states that does not have blood shortages in hospitals.

The next part was the trickiest part for me. Designing a business card in Adobe InDesign was completely new to me and unfortunately I was not able to create exactly what I have imagined in my mind. This draft of my business card was a little bit upsetting to me but I am hoping that with some help I can improve my final draft and make it much closer to what I pictured in the beginning. A friend of mine showed me a business card that she created when she took this class and that helped me to get some new ideas for what I am wanting to do. If I could somehow figure out how to put the “Feel Good. Give Blood” phrase and image as the background of one side of my business card and then place the OBI logo on top of that, I think it could turn out very well. But I think I will need some training and a lot of practice before this possibility becomes a reality. I plan to try to meet with my teacher or another classmate who has a better understanding of how InDesign works. As for the other parts of this assignment, I really enjoyed the research and analysis and creating pinterest blogs with ideas and my thoughts on what the company could do to improve.

I think that my reaction to this was because I am kind of a perfectionist. I have always been one of the best at everything that I do so not having a good knowledge or understanding of how to navigate through InDesign. I am hoping that the more I familiarize myself with it, the more I will be able to do and the better my business card will get. The other parts of the project I really enjoyed because I have always enjoyed doing research and then analyzing my findings so this was something that I am familiar with and very used to doing.

As much as I am ashamed to post this (because it is not good [YET]), here is the first draft of my business card..