1992: MBAs pitch selfie baseball cards and score jobs

It’s hard to imagine, but in 1992, there were no smart phones, no selfies, no LinkedIn. There wasn’t even a career center at Olin.

The job market was tight and first year MBAs were scrambling to line up summer internships. Rising to meet the challenge, Olin’s Marketing Club held a brainstorming session. The result: they created a deck of cards, modeled after baseball cards, with a photo (selfie) on one side and their ‘stats’ on the other. They packaged the cards with a piece of bubble gum and mailed (snail mail) the cards to potential employers.

The clever marketing strategy worked! Students not only got job offers, they also attracted media attention from the likes of Fortune magazine and the very popular Phil Donahue TV talk show.

Thanks to Sandy Jurgenson for telling us about the Marketing Club’s campaign and suggesting we talk to Callaway Ludington Zuccarello, MBA’93, who was a leader of the club and media spokesperson for the group. You can see clips of Callaway on “Donahue” and sharing her fond memories of business school in the video below.

That’s Callaway’s baseball card in Fortune magazine at left. The story featured the baseball card marketing scheme and quotes Syl Stevenson, then-general manager of health foods at Pet, who hired one of the Olin students after receiving the cards, “If I’d gotten a stack of 33 resumes, I would have just scanned them. I read each of the trading cards.”

Callaway remembers that almost all  33 students in the Marketing Club received job offers as a result of the baseball cards attention-grabbers. She and a classmate got summer internships at Sara Lee in Chicago.

If anyone has a set of the baseball cards, please share them with us on social media #Olin100, we’d love to see them!