Visiting Osaka Castle and getting to experience the historical museum that is located inside of it.

Author: Keona Sparkman | Major: International Business | Semester: Summer 2024

Hello! My name is Keona Sparkman and am a Walton Honors student majoring in International Business with a concentration in Marketing and a minor in Japanese. I completed a 2-month internship in Tokyo, Japan this summer through CIEE.

My internship was in person and located in Nagatacho, just a 15-minute train ride from Shibuya. I would work about 38 hours a week with a team of 7 interns. Our major task was to expand our supervisor’s content to an English-speaking audience through constructing an online media base.

Our supervisor is a marketing consultant and works with Japanese companies to modernize their workspace to make employees more confident in their roles and therefore more efficient. So, in order to widen his audience, we wanted to create a new way for people to digest his content and do so in English. We began with researching his target audience, looking into similar online media bases, translating his previously written books from Japanese to English and creating different methods to expand his reach to different parts of the world.

We determined that with our limited amount of time, the areas we would focus on would be creating a website to act as a “hub” for his content, drafting a variety of newsletters that were derived from his previously published books, creating short-form videos to post on social media, and creating an outline for a possible online learning module taught by our supervisor. My supervisor was fascinated by the way that AI can create efficiency in the workplace and encouraged us to use the tools as much as possible to find ways to create quality work as fast as possible. I specifically focused on creating outlines for the newsletters by using AI technology to efficiently translate the content of my supervisors books and from there I drafted “bite-sized” article outlines that covered different topics from his work.

I was also designated project manager about halfway through the internship, so I took on the responsibility of making sure the team was all on the same page, working efficiently towards deadlines, and being cohesive as a unit. I also became responsible for the majority of communication with our supervisor in regard to our project.

By the end of the internship, we were able to make our website public and send out newsletters through email to a list of contacts my supervisor provided to receive feedback from some people who matched our target audience. We got 50 subscribers this way and were able to see what real people had to say about the content we created. This was extremely beneficial for us as we were able to make corrections to our work and improve the media business further.

I learned that within the marketing industry, there is no “right way” to get eyes on a product. Depending on the target audience, the type of product, and culture, there are many ways to approach the marketing plan. Through our research, we saw how different strategies worked for different people and realized that we had to think more deeply about who we were trying to reach and why. I learned that I thoroughly enjoy doing market research because it allows me to understand more about why people make the choices they make. I feel that I better understand the difficulties in creating an effective marketing strategy and I learned that I love this type of challenge. This internship helped me confirm my desire to work internationally doing market research in the future and helped me understand what skills I need to develop in order to be valuable in this type of career.

With my supervisor’s assistance, I was able to make professional connections that allowed me to develop an even deeper understanding of what my future career may look like. In the future, I plan to work for an international company in the United States that provides the opportunity to return to Japan to assist with market research. I hope that one day, I will be able to add value to a company using my Japanese language skills, marketing research skills, and communication skills.