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International students from the �鶹��Ƶ’s have collaborated on a live project to promote the Leicester Comedy Festival.

Leicester loves a laugh. This week sees the return of the , celebrating its 25^th anniversary, with over 830 shows in 69 venues across Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland from 7 - 25 February. This year’s star performers at Europe’s longest-running comedy festival include Harry Hill, Katherine Ryan, Sara Pascoe, Ahir Shah and Alison Thea-Skot.

The students are enrolled on the University’s new MSc Marketing for the Creative Industries programme, which was launched in September. The brief was to review the Comedy Festival’s branding and communication techniques and propose ways in which they could be amended in line with the festival’s audiences. Their research included a Q&A session with the festival’s founder and director, Geoff Rowe, who remarked: “Around a third of visitors to the Comedy Festival are from Leicestershire. My aim was for everyone in the county to know it’s on here in February, but now I’d like everyone in the world to know!”

This project has allowed the students to apply the branding and promotion theory and practice that they’ve learnt to the Comedy Festival They’ve gained valuable experience of working with an ideal organisation for this new marketing programme, with its focus on the creative industries, that they couldn’t gain just from lectures and textbooks. The students also collaborated with the marketing team at the �鶹��Ƶ’s Attenborough Arts Centre, one of the venues for the comedy festival.

Dr Helen Goworek, Lecturer in Creative Marketing at the School of Business, has run live projects to promote specific shows at the Leicester Comedy Festival with her MSc Marketing students on a voluntary basis for the last three years. Last year she incorporated plans to promote the festival into the MSc Marketing for the Creative Industries programme when developing new course content.