Any smartphone can shoot high-resolution video, but when the parents of today’s college students got married in the ’80s, ’90s, and even the early 2000s, VHS camcorders were still the norm for capturing weddings.

The results were often shaky, blurry, or worse – and decades of aging haven’t helped the replay quality of these priceless memories preserved on videotape, either.

Couples married in the pre-digital age are the obvious audience for Boston-based REDO, a company that edits old video footage, DVDs, and old photographs and brings them up to modern standards. 

Less clear, however, is how to market the product as a potential gift idea for mom and dad to a generation that likely has never seen a VHS recorder or player.

For that, REDO founder Patrick Florence turned to Mehreen Pasha, MBA’s “Consumer Behavior” class at Bryant University, whose fall semester project was to conduct competitive research, examine consumer behavior, and assemble focus groups in order to advise REDO on how best to market their service to everyone from Boomers to Zoomers.

As six student teams from Pasha’s class prepare to present their research and recommendations, Florence says he feels both obligated and excited to attend in person. 

“It will be interesting to get the perspectives of 30 bright 20- and 21-year-olds,” he says. “If they were going to spend weeks working on this for me, I wasn’t going to make them track me down to deliver the results.”

Over the course of more than two hours, the student teams provide SWOT analyses of REDO’s perceived strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and business threats, along with some fascinating generational insights. 

One group, for example, dubs REDO a “Gift of Memories” that could be marketed via social media channels like TikTok and Instagram, playing a sample Instagram reel they created for the product. 

Another recommends using Facebook to reach married couples directly, as well as their older children. Students advise Florence to explore using the visually oriented social platform Pinterest to highlight REDO’s work, and suggest using social media contests to drive engagement and interest.

Advice that REDO be more transparent about pricing on its website resonates immediately with the company’s CEO. 

“Pricing upfront is definitely something we will look at,” Florence says. Students also deliver a consistent message about the cost of REDO’s service, saying it is out of reach for their budgets and recommending that the company develop some more affordable options for targeting younger customers.

One team’s billboard campaign, featuring a bride and groom standing at the side of a road by a burning car with the tagline, ‘Because no one’s wedding pics should look like this,’ particularly delights Florence.

“That was so smart,” he says. 

Likewise, Florence praises a search engine optimization analysis that finds REDO’s website lacking in use of keywords and other elements that aid online searches. 

“That was brutal; it was tough for me to look at,” he tells the class, adding: “It was a humbling trip down here. That was awesome.”

At the outset of the presentations, Florence’s focus is on the benefits that students can get out of the project. 

“The main thing is to help them do the kind of work an agency would,” he says, adding, “if they’re good at it, they could get a job.” 

That was the case earlier this year, for example, when Florence hired Julia Haddad ’24 as a digital content strategist at REDO’s parent company, Torro Media.

“I felt like I took most of the value out of this. You took this in so many different directions, and that’s what I was hoping for.”

As the presentations conclude, however, Florance tells the class, “I felt like I took most of the value out of this,” adding, “You took this in so many different directions, and that’s what I was hoping for.”

Harry Patterson ’26, who is studying Communications and Marketing at Bryant, says the REDO project, which reflects his personal interest in film, helped improve his networking skills as well as providing experience that could help in a future career.

“It was great to meet Patrick and to get on a call with him when we were working on our presentation,” he says. “I’ve never done a focus group before, but we got some good information from that.”

Pasha says the teams were especially excited to present their work directly to REDO’s founder. 

“They knew he was coming and wanted to impress him,” she says. “They got a lot of new skills out of this.”

Florence says the “presentations were unique and creative, and they identified some real weaknesses we can improve on.”

“They nailed it.”