Marketing MindWorks: Add Some Online Interactives to Your Marketing Course

I have been vibecoding with Claude. What is vibe coding? It is a way to create software, websites, or apps using everday language that prompts an AI to build, run, and fix the app without writing or checking individual lines of code. It is also fun. Claude Code has helped me develop some online activities.

I asked Claude to identify some of the more challenging concepts in marketing and to suggest ideas for interactives that require students to use higher-level critical thinking skills to solve. So far I have developed 6 activities, each with multiple variations that result in 16 short, self-guided exercises that ask students to make a marketing decision, commit to it, and then see why it does or doesn’t fit with key marketing concepts.

I plan to continue to develop these exercises, resulting in about 20-25 exercises, with 2-4 variations for each. These, with an accompanying instructor’s manual, should be completed by mid-September. I anticipate making these available in the 2027 release of Essentials of Marketing. They provide great reinforcement of key marketing concepts and many will work with any textbook. For now, I am offering free access to anyone interested. Feel free to use them with your students.

Here are some samples:

1. Build the Mix. Sort marketing decisions onto the four Ps and the target market. Learn why the customer is not a fifth P — and why the right P can still be the wrong choice.
   1. Rooted Cold Brew
   1. FadeHouse Barbershop
2. Find the Broken P. A mix is already built and three Ps fit the target — one does not. Diagnose the broken P and see why it fails the fit test.
   1. CampusCart
   1. ClearTone Hearing
3. Marketing Strategy Choices: Two Retailers. Two retailers make opposite four-P choices, each right for its own shoppers. Sort the decisions and see why there is no single best mix.
   1. Two Grocery Retailers
   1. Two Eyewear Retailers

If you are interested in using these with your students, please send me an email (Joe dot Cannon at Colostate dot edu) and I can hook you up with more exercises and some instructor materials. Put Marketing MindWorks in the subject line.