The campus-wide hammock day last Monday began as a project in an introductory marketing course.
The hammocking event was not a simple push for people to go outside and hammock but was a classroom group effort to discover a correlation between Chaco owners and Eno hammock owners.
Students were invited through social media accounts on Twitter and Instagram to “Come outside and hang with us!”
“I was wanting people to take pictures of themselves in their hammocks, sort of to help promote today, but also to create a prototype that we could send into Chaco as an idea for them to utilize our campaign idea.”
Annie Bailey, sophomore psychology major from Abilene, led the event from the class and said more than 20 people participated, but it was twice as many men than women.
“We were assigned a brand, and our brand was Chaco,” Bailey said. “So we had to come up with a new product that Chaco could reasonably sell. We came up with a Chaco Hammock. It was just an idea at first, then we had to come up with a way to promote it.”
The marketing group consisted of Ashlann Wood, senior animal science major from Conroe, Brian Lang, junior accounting major from Abilene, Andrew Schackmann, senior communications major from Spring, and Taylor Hayes, senior biology major from Childress.
Through a Twitter account, @hangingoutatACU, and Instagram account, @hangingoutatacu, Bailey has been promoting the campaign with 63 followers on Instagram, and 23 responded invitees on the day of the event.
“I started a week ago, and this has all been in one week,” she said. “We just wanted to make it really quick so people weren’t annoyed about hearing it over and over again. I also used Campus Quad which was suggested by a freshman. I liked that I actually got other people interested. ”
The group asked questions about what students would change about their hammocks, how they heard about the event and whether the students owned Chacos.
Bailey said the decided to put on a hammocking day to draw out the people who owned hammocks so they could survey them.
Nicholas Cromwell, freshman accounting major from Dallas, participated in hammock day.
“I participated in the hammock day because the weather was great, and it was a reason to study/nap outside for a while,” he said. “It was a nice break from the usual library scenery.”
The next hammock day is tentatively scheduled for Dead Day on May 4. Hammocks on ACU’s campus are very popular, and Bailey wants to continue the project even after the class is done.
“We were hoping to make it a yearly thing, or even just a second-semester monthly thing, because it will be nice weather out,” Bailey said.
