Marketing, PR Capstone Projects Highlight ‘Slow Your Roll’ Initiative

In a cross-campus collaboration, Marketing Communication and Communication Studies students designed compelling capstone presentations pitching new approaches to promote the Emerson College Wellness Center’s substance use initiative.

“The idea with this combined capstone initiative is to create a product that goes beyond an on-campus project, and becomes an initiative that can be taken to the national level,” said Communication Studies Executive-in-Residence Kevin Mercuri ’91, MA ’93.

Mercuri’s PR class teamed up with a Marketing Communication class, taught by Professor Roxana Maiorescu, for capstone presentations in which students applied their skills to create awareness campaigns for Slow Your Roll, an Emerson Wellness Center initiative.

Slow your Roll encourages students to moderate their substance use and other unhealthy behaviors by using harm reduction strategies to reduce physical, emotional, and academic harm. The initiative is different from other programs that look to address substance use because it’s not pushing for abstinence, but instead favors pragmatic tips that consider the pressures and realities that college students face.

The students’ capstone initiative, presented on December 10 in The Judee, included seven presentations by two teams of Marketing Communication students and five teams of Communication Studies public relations students.

On the marketing side, Maiorescu’s students focused on building a Slow Your Roll brand that would appeal and relate better to college students, with the goal of eventually growing the program beyond Emerson’s campus. 

One team shared creative ways to amplify Slow Your Roll’s marketability with different budget levels. Their solutions ranged from artistic and relatable posters to fun activities that emphasized sober recreation such as comedy shows and alcohol-free pop-up bars.  

“We set out to solve a problem that numbers alone can’t fix,” said Marketing major Jerry Sun ’26. “This isn’t just a school-wide problem, it’s a nationwide problem. And as we know, creativity thrives when students do.”

One of the Marketing groups’ presentations, “Frame Your Free Mind,” sought to introduce a cinematic approach to harm reduction. They emphasized utilizing Emerson’s storytelling culture, by laying out a program that would allow students to “re-frame” negative experiences with substance abuse through a creative and therapeutic filmmaking exercise. 

After completing their pitches, students shared how their capstone experiences have helped prepare them for future professional endeavors.

“We all really appreciated the opportunity to work on creative solutions to… relevant problems,” said Sun. “Everything we did will be useful for our professional lives. The experience really allowed us to hone essential marketing skills.”

Mercuri’s students constructed different aspects of a combined public relations initiative that aimed to increase Slow Your Roll’s public image across different audiences including students, faculty, staff, and Emerson parents.

Students each tackled an element of this program, ranging from preliminary research to media relations, logo and website design, and social media initiatives.    

“My favorite part of this experience was the opportunity to essentially start from scratch on a project without much history or development on the public relations side,” said Elle Baray-Forget ’25. “It’s useful to work on tangible things before heading into the workforce.”