teachthe4ps.com - For instructors of marketing.

As regular readers know, my introductory marketing students write a personal marketing plan.  I often post articles and links — here and at Learn the 4 Ps — with information to help students better create their own personal marketing plan. Last week I listened to The Startup of You, a book that describes how people should look at their careers through the eyes of an entrepreneur.  For an interesting visual overview of the book, click here.  One of the authors, Reid Hoffman, is a very successful entrepreneur who helped start PayPal and cofounded LinkedIn.  While the book sometimes gives a bit too much explanation of how to use LinkedIn (chapter 4) most of the book is very relevant to students looking at making career decisions (see particularly chapters 1 – 3).

The book has great advice for the rest of us, too.  The “security” of tenure doesn’t quite feel the same when you wonder if higher education is the next major industry to be disrupted by a technological breakthrough.  The more prepared we are for a rapidly changing working world, the better we will be in teaching and advising our students (and children).  Also posted at at Learn the 4 Ps.

We know that many of our readers are having to do more online teaching.  It can help a lot to learn from others that have already made this transition.  You might find some “Practical Advice for Going from Face to Face to Online Teaching” (Faculty Focus, February 9, 2012) if you read this short article.  For more Teach the 4 Ps posts on online teaching, click “online teaching” in the list of tags on the right.

The marketing strategy planning process model in this Prezi presentation provides an overarching framework for our marketing text books.  We provide an introduction of this in chapter 2, and those of you using our books might find this Prezi a nice addition to class. I believe this will require Flash animation — so you may not be able to view it on an iPad.  Here are some keys to operating the Prezi:

• Click “More” and have it play full screen — the effects are much better.
• Use the forward/back arrow to move forward/back through the presentation one step at a time
• When you come to some of the embedded videos, simply hover your cursor over the video and you will see the “play” arrow.  If you click the video again, it will get larger
• For readers of our books the narration should be straightforward to figure out — probably for most viewers.
• Note that the chapter numbers correspond to Essentials of Marketing — and will differ slightly for Basic Marketing.

For everyone — this is my first Prezi.  There are some things I have learned — you need to have a high resolution version of any model you zoom into.  I am working on fixing that.  Please tell me what you think?  Anyone else have experience with Prezi?  Any tips?  Click on the comments link below and tell me what you think.  I have also published this at Learn the 4 Ps.

Fortune magazine just published its list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For” (January 20, 2012).  The usual players — Google, Boston Consulting Group, SAS Institute, and Wegmans Food Markets — top the list again.  Many of our students would love to work for these companies and reading the list will give them ideas about what companies they want to work for as well as what to look for.

What I really like about this year’s list is a slide show feature titled “They’re Hiring.”  This feature lists 25 companies that have at least 700 job openings.  Even better, each featured company includes a section where one of the company’s recruiters offers “Secrets to impressing their recruiters.”  I found some really useful advice here — advice that will benefit our students.  You might find this especially helpful if your students are writing a personal marketing plan.  So I have also posted this at Learn the 4 Ps.

I think we all want to be the ideal professor.  But sometimes it helps to have some ideas about how to achieve this objective.  A short article at Faculty Focus, “The Ideal Professor vs. The Typical Professor” (January 16, 2012) describes some key findings from a study of teachers.

Happy New Year!  Many blogs and magazines like to do some sort of year in review article or issue.  We think this is a good idea and thought you might like to see our highlights from 2011.  So we looked back on the 199 posts we made in 2011 and chose our “Favorite 25 Posts.”  The primary criteria for selection was usefulness as you go into 2012 — we hope that some of the examples from last year remain relevant for you and your students.  We also posted some timely and timeless teaching tips and higher ed issues.

One of our objectives at Teach the 4 Ps is to provide another avenue to help you stay current.  This past year we looked at the evolution of daily deal sites in a series of posts, the most recent being “Can LivingSocial Differentiate Itself From Other Daily Deal Sites?” (1).   Of course we also continued to cover social media, which moves much faster than text books coverage.  So we had posts like “Best Practices in Social Media” (2), “Consumers Combine Search, Social Media For Purchasing Decisions” (3), and “Facebook – Big Brands Like its Reach and Its Cost” (4).  Consumers are increasingly turning to online customer reviews for buying advice – but should they?, see “A Rave, a Pan, or Just a Fake? Online Reviews.” (5).  It doesn’t hurt to get advice from a leader like P&G, so check out  “How P&G sees the future of marketing,” (6).  Another trend has been the increase in point-of-purchase promotion, often referred to as shopper marketing, see “In-Store Marketing on the Rise.” (7).

Many of our readers like the timely case studies we help them bring to class. We posted some short video case studies that included a discussion of a strategy, its execution, and the results.  Someof these studies highlighted creative marketing practices from around the globe:  for example this one from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, watch “A Nissan Dealer’s “Accidental Test Drive” (8) and from Brazil a B2B case study – “B2B, Direct Marketing, International — and Creative! What more can you ask for? Pizza maybe” (9).  Click the international category to the right for more international examples — as of today there are 55 posts in international.

We try to post some video case studies that resonate with students and work well in the classroom:  “The Story Behind Coke’s ‘Happiness Machine’” (10), “Great IMC Case Study: Bing / Decode Jay-Z” (11) and “Proof that Advertising Works – Minivans are now cool!” (12).  Three of our favorite articles from last year were case studies as well, “How Carrots Became the New Junk Food” (13), “Revitalizing a Mature Product: The Case of Philly Cream Cheese,” (14) and a B2G example in “Flogging Flak Jackets in War Zones” (15).  We have also found that our students learn well from analyzing marketing mistakes, so we posted “Learning from Mistakes – How Faulty Marketing Has Stalled TV Sales” (16) and “Coke Pulls White “Save the Arctic” Cans After Market Confusion.” (17)

Students seem to relate to ethics with contemporary case studies, which provide nice classroom discussion fodder – see “Professional Selling Ethics…,” (18) and “Updating ‘The ethics of sunscreen’” (19).

We continue to believe that hte 4 Ps are a robust organizer for marketing activities — and help students better understand marketing.  We feel it is dangerous for students to ignore some of the P’s as the provocative posts of some bloggers advocate.  We replied to one blogger in “Defending the 4 Ps of marketing on the web.” (20)

We also tried to help you with your teaching.  One of our most popular posts was on one of Joe’s assignments, “The Personal Marketing Plan assignment in the Principles of Marketing class”. (21)  We have plenty of teaching tips for teaching both in the classroom and online:  “Teaching Tip: “Strategies for Facilitating More Effective Classroom Discussions” (22), and  “The Underbelly of Online Teaching” (23).  For many more articles on teaching, click the “Tips for Teaching” link under “Categories” to the right of this post — as of today we have 40 links in that category.

Finally, many any of you are interested in trends in higher education more generally, so we shared posts on “The Debate Over Academic Rigor in B-Schools” (24) and the “National Survey of Student Engagement 2011” (25).

Cheating is wrong in so many ways.  This continues to be a challenge for teachers at all levels.  Now students are using high tech methods to cheat even more.  I am one of the naive instructors who don’t think it is happening — but perhaps I need to do more than have two versions of the exam.  I have always wondered about putting more severe restrictions and controls just to deal with the remaining 3-5% who might be finding other ways to cheat.  Maybe I am underestimating the number cheating in my classes.  You can read more in this USA Today article, “eCheating: Students find high-tech ways to deceive teachers” (December 15, 2011).

Most of us have adapted our teaching approaches over time to meet changing students.  Psychology professor Christy Price conducted some qualitative research to better understand how she could appeal to today’s students.  She has summarized these in her 5 Rs:  1) Relevant learning for today’s students, 2) Research-based approaches to instruction, 3) Rationales for course outcomes, policies and assessments, 4) Relaxed and participatory learning environments, and 5) Relational opportunities and rapport with professors.  As I look back over my 20 years of teaching college student, my approach has evolved along those lines as well — though there is plenty of room for improvement.  So Price’s approach has me thinking about ideas for getting better.  Maybe the article in Faculty Focus “The Five R’s of Engaging Millennial Students” (November 16, 2011) will stimulate your thinking, too.

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) annually surveys college students to better understand how they engage with college.  NSSE proposes that student engagement includes two criteria, one of which is “the amount of time and effort students put into their studies and other educationally purposeful activities.”  Highlights (lowlights?) from the National Survey of Student Engagement, Annual Results 2011 (click through for the full 52 page report) include:

• 80% of seniors in business perceives substantial gains in job- or work-related skills (tied with engineering for second place behind education).  I guess we are teaching most of them something useful.
• Only 19% of senior business majors spend more than 20 hours per week preparing for class (dead last among 7 majors).  Business students average just 14 hours per week outside of class — also lowest among the seven majors.
• College of business faculty also have the lowest expectations of how much time their students are spending preparing for class — just 15 hours. Here at Teach the 4 Ps we have written about “The Debate Over Academic Rigor in B-Schools” (April 19, 2011).  Are our low expectations contributing to the perceived lack of rigor in our classes?
• Senior business majors spend an average of 16 hours per week working for pay — the highest among all majors (a full 3 hours ahead of second place “social sciences”).

I find the results very interesting.  When I first started teaching, I was told to design a class where my students would have about 2 hours of homework for every hour in class.  So in a 3-credit hour class, a student should expect 6 hours per week of homework.

I still try to work toward that goal, but students complain about the workload and I have tempered my expectations.  This semester my students are reading 18 chapters in a text book, spending a minimum required 25 minutes per chapter on LearnSmart (which most use as a test study tool — there are about 150 flash cards per chapter — though adaptive learning means they probably do less and many spend about an hour, making it their primary or only test study tool), doing 15 Connect homework problems (about 15 minutes each), writing a personal marketing plan, and doing an optional marketing simulation (takes a reported 4 hours to complete on their own).  If I assume that students take 1.5 hours to read a chapter, spend an hour per chapter on LearnSmart studying for the test and 8 hours to write the personal marketing plan (a 4-6 page paper) — this adds up to about 60 hours over 15 weeks.  This is only four hours of homework per week.  Is this too much?  I think my students will say “YES?” and my ratings may suffer.  But I am tenured and I do think my assignments are more than busy work.

How do you design your classes?  How many hours per week do you expect students to spend on your class — outside of class time?  Has this changed over time?

We are pretty excited about the latest edition of our text book — Essentials of Marketing.  We heard from instructors that they wanted more on the digital lifestyles of customers, more social media, more Connect Marketing online homework, the LearnSmart adaptive study tool, and lower book prices.  So we have responded.  The latest edition of Essentials of Marketing has just published.  In fact, you can just click here to reserve your complimentary desk copy (registered instructors only, or buy your copy at Amazon.com).   What can you expect with the 13th edition?

• What you have always received from the Perreault team — the best teaching and learning package in the business — with a bullet-proof test bank, and online homework and study tools.  A comprehensive yet readable text book with current examples.  A managerial approach to the study of marketing.  Plus a fantastic set of PowerPoint slides that include built-in interactive exercises, ads, and video clips.  Plus our ever popular teaching videos and video cases..
• What’s new?  Reflecting changes in customer behavior, we have significantly enhanced our coverage of the digital lifestyles of customers.  These changes have more organizations using social media and other digital tools for marketing research and throughout the marketing mix.  We have a great new conceptual organizer that will help students understand more than just what social media is — but how to build it into the marketing mix.
• In a less trusting world, trust has become even more valuable — so we have greater coverage of trust throughout the book.
• A new lower price the book is even more appealing to student — imagine a real text book (not just a magazine) at a $99 net price!

Do you like the Teach the 4 Ps blog and newsletter and our Learn the 4 Ps family of social media?  Then be sure to check out the new book.