F1 in Schools is a competition among secondary school students to develop the fastest racing car with environmental sustainability in mind. Our very own NUS Business School Associate Professor Ang Swee Hoon is the marketing mentor to the all-girls winning team from Singapore—Team Divignite.
Marketing a racing car
Team Divignite (from left: Jillian Loh, Xie Yuhan, Amanda Chan, Karin Goh, and Jeanette Lee) with Associate Professor Ang Swee Hoon.
Team Divignite is from Raffles Girls’ School. As a Secondary Two team then, they emerged as Champions in last year’s National Finals, beating several senior teams. This win qualifies them to represent Singapore at the World Finals in Abu Dhabi in November 2019.
Its Marketing leader, Amanda Chan, says “We are excited to represent Singapore and want to do our best for the country.”
“As Science students with no Marketing background, we sought out Marketing experts. We found Professor Ang Swee Hoon on the NUS Business School web site and thought that her profile and expertise matched what we wanted. We emailed her and she was most responsive to us.”
Without financial assistance from the school, Team Divignite has to rely on generous sponsors to fund their car project as well as communications materials. While the objective is to build a sustainable racing car and educate the public about Science, the all-girls Team Divignite also has a secondary objective — to debunk the myth that Science is only for the boys. It wants to encourage more girls to be involved in Science projects.
Over several discussions, Professor Ang helped them reach out to various companies for sponsorship, which helped them immensely in financing their team for the big competition. She also shared her knowledge on how to position their appeal and marketing communications programme to maximise reach, capture audience attention, and educate people about Science. As Science students with no knowledge about Marketing, the team had a steep learning curve but with the help of Professor Ang, they began to understand more about Marketing.
Professor Ang says, “The girls are smart. They had a crash course on Marketing and they learnt fast. Hopefully, this will give them an advantage over other teams. It’s not just the final product that counts – the fastest racing car – but also convincing others of the idea behind the car.”
“We learned of ways to captivate people’s attention. As this project may be boring to a large part of the public who are not interested in Science, Prof Ang gave us tips on how to make our materials more attractive to draw attention. We also learnt about staying distinctive and relevant to people so that they will continue reading our posts,” added Amanda.
This included marketing strategies to help the team make smarter decisions on the type of content they should post on social media accounts as well as offline communications such as posters to reach out to a wider community.
To find out more about Team Divignite and their F1 in Schools journey, follow them on instagram at www.instagram.com/team.divignite, facebook at https://www.facebook.com/team.divignite and check out their website at https://teamdivignite.weebly.com/. The team can also be reached at team.divignite@gmail.com