teachthe4ps.com - For instructors of marketing.

I will be surprised if you have not already seen the scathing review of B-Schools in, “The Default Major:  Skating Through B-School” (New York Times, April 14, 2011).  This article blasts business schools for their lack of rigor — and light college load.  It is especially critical of marketing and management.

I must confess, we have shortened our books over time and removed some content; we hear from the market that students don’t want to read so much.  Of course the opportunity to add rigor and give students a variety of marketing activities can be achieved by integrating our cases, online homework exercises, other online activities, ethics exercises, end of chapter problems, the Marketing Plan Coach, and many other extras.

So how did we get here?  Is it because the primary method for evaluating our teaching comes from end of semester student evals — and we figure that being rigorous in class will lead to harsher student evaluations?  Is it because of time pressure from research, service, and higher teaching loads?  Do these additional responsibilities and expectations result in dumbing down what we do?  Do they make us reluctant to assign homework and written assignments?  Are there other reasons?  What do you think?

Are you looking to add some rigor to your classes?  For more general thoughts on this topic, I will direct you to another reading, “What Can Be Done to Boost Academic Rigor?“  (Faculty Focus, April 11, 2011).  For a more specific answer, I offer one suggestion from our text book package.  Our books have recently added Connect Marketing homework exercises (click here for more info).  We have found them to be popular with students and add rigor by asking them to apply concepts their read about.  Connect assignments are self-grading to keep instructor workload at a minimum.  They require students to do some critical thinking and more complex reasoning.

“Four Characteristics of Successful Teachers,” Faculty Focus, March 29, 2011.  While these characteristics are not a surprise, it sometimes helps to be reminded.

Need some motivation to look for more ways to get students to participate?  Here at Teach the 4 Ps we like to offer the occasional teaching tip — as well as great marketing examples and content.  Over at the Faculty Focus site, author Marellen Weimer suggests “10 Benefits of Getting Students to Participate in Classroom Discussions” (February 15, 2011) will make us feel guilty for not doing it more often.  Fortunately, she also has another post to give you ideas about how to make it work — “Six Keys to More Effective Class Discussions” (Faculty Focus, April 6, 2010).

We keep finding more and more faculty being thrust into the challenge of online teaching.  Many of the supplements for our text books are designed to support faculty teaching online.  Those of us who have taught at a distance know that the biggest challenge can be the time it takes.   If that describes you, you might find it helpful to read the ten strategies used by Deborah Raines and described in this blog post “Be Efficient, Not Busy:  Time Management Strategies for Online Teaching,” (Faculty Focus, January 24, 2011).

We are all looking for ways to help our students learn.  As many of us probably knew, test-taking is more than student evaluation — it helps students learn better.  This New York Times article, “To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test” (January 20, 2011) reports on a  recent study published in the journal Science (you may need a subscription or to be on a college campus for this) which compared four methods of studying: 1) studied the material in a single session, 2) repeatedly studied the material, 3) used concept mapping where they drew diagrams to connect the material they were learning, and 4) took a test after learning the information. Test taking actually resulted in significantly higher performance on a test taken one week later. For more details read the NYT article or the Science article for all the technical details.

Most of us know that students like to have “practice tests” — well this also suggests that these may be a good idea.  Many marketing text books (including our books – Basic Marketing and Essentials of Marketing) have practice quizzes on a web site.  Your students should probably be taking those quizzes.  See www.mhhe.com/fourps for links to our books and the quizzes for each chapter.  Note, this was also posted at the Learn the 4 Ps website.

We have added a Facebook page for “Learn the 4 Ps” our sister site dedicated to all students of marketing.  For more details, check out our post at Learn the 4 Ps — and “Like Us” or search for us “Learn the 4 Ps” at Facebook .   And spread the word to your students — the more fans we get the better. 

Also, let me know, with comments to this post, if we should start a Facebook page for Teach the 4 Ps.  If you “liked” such a page, it would put each of our Teach the 4 Ps posts into your Facebook news feed.  What do you think?  Would you “like” this?

A few years ago, my friend Tom Boyd (Professor at Cal State Fullerton) and I were talking about the challenge of engaging non-marketing majors in the intro course.  Tom does some very creative activities in the first couple of weeks of class to demonstrate how all functional areas need to work together.  From that conversation I got some great ideas — at this point I am not even sure which were Tom’s and which were mine.

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.

Note:  We typically try not to focus on our text book — so that users of any book can find the content useful.  While this post emphasizes our book, we think the topic is important for all of us teaching marketing.  We are interested in your input, too.  So please post comments.

One of our biggest challenges, as instructors (and as marketing text book authors), has been figuring out how to teach students about new forms of promotion.  We know that customers and marketers increasingly utilize websites, social media (Twitter, Facebook, reviews, viral video, white papers, blogs), and even branded content (online games or sponsored services – click here for examples of sponsored services)  to communicate with customers.  We need to move behind simply slipping these new forms of Promotion in as random examples throughout our courses.  The topic needs specialized treatment so that students know when, how and why such approaches are effective.  How they fit into an effective marketing mix.  This was a major challenge and a major thrust of the latest edition of Basic Marketing (18^th edition, 2011 – published last week!).

In Basic Marketing and Essentials of Marketing we take great pride in developing conceptual organizers that help students understand marketing concepts so they learn how to effectively apply them.  It was almost 50 years ago that one of our co-authors, Jerry McCarthy, invented the 4 P’s and revolutionized the teaching of marketing with a managerial approach.

In the latest edition of Basic Marketing we wanted to help our students figure out how these new promotion vehicles fit into the marketing mix.  We decided that they fit as an element of the promotion mix, under publicity.  In our books we define publicity as “any unpaid form of nonpersonal presentation of ideas, goods, or service” (Essentials of Marketing, 2010, p. 324).  This drove a new expanded section on publicity our latest edition that addressed these new promotion tools.

We set up the importance of these new media throughout the book.  For example, recent research showed that customers trust communications from other customers (even those they don’t know and read in online reviews) more than traditional media (Teach the 4 Ps, November 21, 2009).  We also highlight consumers’ increasing used of the internet and other forms of technology as a source of product information.  We completely revised our global demographics to show the rapid rise of technology – cell phones and internet access – in emerging markets.  These topics are introduced in chapters on customer behavior and the communication process.

We organize publicity by first distinguishing how customers obtain the communication – from the popular and trade press (traditional public relations) or as “found” media obtained through online search, “pass-along” from others, or direct personal experience.  We then distinguish between tools used for one-way communication to customers:  for example online video, useful website content, games, and podcasts for consumers and commercial white papers, case studies, and webinars for business customers.  Another set of tools focus on interactive communication:  for example blogs, microblogs (Twitter), social media (Facebook and FourSquare), customer reviews for consumers and other social media (e.g., LinkedIn and Plaxo), blogs, and online communities targeting business customers.  Like most businesses, we don’t limit our coverage to the internet, for example Samsung provided free charging stations in airports – a form of branded content.

We show how many of the principles of advertising apply to these new media.  And we emphasize the need to have these tools as one element of an integrated promotion blend.  We suggest which forms of media might best help a marketing manager achieve particular promotion objectives.  Our coverage of this topic includes several useful exhibits and many current examples.

How have you been covering social media and websites in your classes?  What do you think of our organizing structure?  To give you a taste of our approach, we have attached scans of a few pages from the new “Publicity” section of Basic Marketing.  Click here to download sample pages from the new publicity section in Basic Marketing 18e. Do you find our approach helpful?  Contact your McGraw Hill sales rep and ask him or her for a copy of the latest edition of Basic Marketing (18^th edition).  Read through our treatment of this topic – and give us some feedback.

We are trying to practice what we teach.  You have already found the Teach the 4 P’s blog – and you may be receiving our monthly Teach the 4 Ps newsletter or the Twitter feed.  We have also developed the Learn the 4 Ps blog and Twitter feed for students – and a Learn the 4 Ps Facebook page is in development.

PowerPoint — love it?  hate it?  Most of us still feel we have to use it.  I know that many of our readers are having to teach online — some for the first time.  So you might appreciate this short post from the Faculty Focus website “How Much Multimedia Should You Add to PowerPoint Slides When Teaching Online?” (September 22, 2010).

This funny video (see below) calls to mind the worst of PowerPoint.  Most of us need PowerPoint in the classroom — if nothing else just to keep on track.  This article at Slate (May 5, 2010) “No More Bullet Points, No More Clip Art:  PowerPoint isn’t evil if you know how to use it” offers some suggestions for better presentations.  The author, Farhad Manjoo doesn’t like PowerPoints — we avoid them, too.  Our books’ slides have almost no bullet points or cartoonish clipart.