Pope-Ruark led branding discussion at regional conference

Dr. Rebecca Pope-Ruark, assistant professor of English in the Professional Writing and Rhetoric concentration, attended the Association for Business Communication Southeast regional convention in Columbia, SC, March 13-15. Pope-Ruark is the only junior faculty member of the national organization’s “Future of ABC” taskforce which has been responsible for drafting a new five-year strategic plan for ABC and is currently working with a subgroup of the taskforce concerned with the organization’s brand identity and marketing efforts. As part of this group, she and Gary Jones of Western Carolina University led an open discussion with attendees of the conference to collect opinions regarding the name, discipline, strengths, and weaknesses of the organization. Information collected from this session will be combined with feedback from similar sessions at other regional conferences and developed into a marketing recommendation report of ways to enhance ABC’s branding and marketing efforts to be submitted to the ABC Executive Council in September.