Fortune

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.

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).

• 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?

• 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.

That post reminds students that employers look at Facebook profiles and refers them to an article at Social Media Today, “How Social Media Will Help Your Job Search” (September 18, 2011).  The post also provides links to one person’s rather extreme efforts to get a job at Google through social media.

1. Creativity is central not only to marketing — but to business success in general.  So when you get two interesting people talking about creativity, you blog about it.  Check out our post “Conan O’Brien and Seth Godin on Creativity.“
2. Here is one that might get your students talking — what about using brain scans to help write the next hit pop song — “New Product Development — For Pop Songs?“
3. Nike is one of our students’ favorite brands — we bet your students, too.  Nike’s latest strategy has them moving into niche sports, sports where many of our students participate, “Nike Looks to Niche Sports for Growth.”
4. Dan Ariely always has some interesting, theory and research based insights – see “How Online Companies Get you to Share More and Spend More.“
5. A lot of pundits try to question the usefulness of the 4 Ps as a guide to marketing in the digital age.  We believe the model makes even more sense — and Joe made a post this past summer in response to a post by author and speaker David Meerman Scott.  See “Defending the 4 Ps of marketing on the web.“
6. We have posted several different times this summer on ethics — but probably my favorite is “The ethics of sunscreen” — which includes links to both the point and a counterpoint.
7. Here is a good example of personal selling in B2G (business to government) “Flogging Flak Jackets in War Zones.“
8. For some reason you can find tons of examples of marketing in China — but what about its very populous southern neighbor, India.  We have one for you in this article/video combination “The Challenge of Changing Consumer Behavior – P&G in India.”
9. Nothing like a great example from a fast-growing economy – “B2B, Direct Marketing, International – Creative!  What more can you ask for?  Pizza maybe.”  This would be a great video to show on the first day of class.
10. Then maybe our favorite post of the summer is “Great IMC Case Study:  Bing/Decode Jay-Z” — our students are the target market for this very successful campaign.