Excellence in Marketing Education and Innovative Teaching Track - Special Session Creating Value in Marketing Courses

This session features three different approaches to teaching marketing research and one approach to teaching sports marketing. All four approaches illustrate how we can bring more realism and business practice into the classroom and merge these experiences with process and theory. Marketing research is a large and growing component of the marketing enterprise. Yet, extracting consumer insights from data can be difficult. Indeed, in a recent survey of over 1,500 American Marketing Association members, 45.7% of respondents singled out data analysis as either their biggest or second biggest challenge (Arnold 2005). More generally, “analytics” is increasingly perceived as a source of competitive advantage (Davenport 2006). Despite the growing importance of marketing research in the real world, most business students do not look forward to taking a course marketing research (Bridges 1999). Research has shown that students don’t look forward to marketing research because they typically do not understand what marketing research is or who does marketing research, they fear either “research” or the use of statistics, they presume the course is difficult, or do not know how it applies in the real world. These same issues can be mitigated by the use of activities that bring the real world into the classroom such as hands-on-experience, guest speakers, connections to real data and problems in an environment that allows the students to express themselves and learn not only from the instructor, but from their peers in a team based environment. As such, the three papers in this session represent three different strategies to achieve these goals.