This article might provide a nice addition to a discussion of branding, pricing, or manufacturing/costs (in Basic Marketing we cover marketing cost analysis and examine costs and production in our cross-functional chapter).

This post over at Harvard’s Working Knowledge site, “HBS Cases:  QuikTrip’s Investment in Retail Employees Pays Off,” (May 25, 2011) describes how convenience store chain QuikTrip delivers high quality service at low cost.  The case shows how operational and human resource decisions made by QuikTrip result in high quality service and reasonable prices.

The article describes and links to several Harvard Business School cases you could read for even more depth and other examples.  Our text books have a cross-functional chapter where this example could be integrated into class discussion.   The example could also work when you cover quality (we get to that in the product chapters) or retailing.

First, I want to show my students how marketing interfaces with other functions in a business.  I want to get the non-marketing majors engaged early.  So, during the second week of class, I have students read the cross-functional chapter in Basic Marketing (chapter 20: “Managing Marketing’s Link With Other Functional Areas”)  which describes how marketing strategy requires cooperation with human resources, production, finance and accounting.

Second, I try to show students how knowledge of marketing will help other majors to do their jobs better.  So I add articles from the popular press and sometimes with guest speakers that show how marketing principles help people in other functional areas to do their jobs better.  I will be using this article, “In Hiring, Firms Shine Images,” (Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2011 – non-subscribers click here) next fall to show how human resources uses marketing tactics to recruit the best employees.

The article offers some examples that can be used when you teach international marketing (product adaptation) and the local factory turns a weakness into a strength.

VW’s 2011 Super Bowl commercial (“The Force” see below)  was one of the most popular — though I must confess I was not a fan.  While I found the ad cute, I didn’t think it said anything relevant about the brand.

The article provides a nice complement to the coverage of quality management in our text books — as well as our coverage of cross-functional collaboration (with production/operations) in Basic Marketing. Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.

Fortune

My students write personal marketing plans — so they like this information.  Many of them would love to work at Google and from this photo you can see that it looks like a fun place to work.  Also posted at Learn the 4 Ps.

I now try to achieve two objectives during the second week of class.  I want my students to know:  1) how marketing interacts with other functional areas of the business and 2) how other functional areas of the firm utilize marketing principles.  I now spend the second week of class with guest speakers from IT, accounting, finance, operations, and HR.  These businesspeople talk about both of these issues.  My students also read chapter 20 in Basic Marketing - “Managing Marketing’s Links With Other Functional Areas” along with some other readings that show how other functional areas utilize marketing concepts.  I have received many positive comments from students — and more importantly the non-marketing majors seem more engaged throughout the semester.  Thanks for the ideas Tom.

Now I have a new reading I will use next time, “HR or Marketing:  Who is better equipped to manage employee engagement?” (in Performance Perspectives, January 3, 2011, a publication by the Madison Performance Group, a consulting firm).  The last line of the article says what I want my HR students to understand:  “But to be truly the best at generating connections that drive long term value and loyalty, HR will need to start acting, and executing, like Marketing.”  And for some reason when someone else says it, the students believe it even more.