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Lessons Learned November 2000 "Using Concept Papers in the Marketing Strategy Course" By Raghu Tadepalli and Clint B. Schertzer, Department of Marketing Marketing Strategy course is a required course in most Executive MBA
degree programs. Being the only Marketing course in the program the
learning that is required is vast. This process is complicated by
the fact that some students already have business degrees and others
have never had a business course. The objective of the marketing
strategy course is to give the students a flavor of the complexities
of formulating, implementing, and managing marketing strategy and
programs. While case analyses are one useful way to accomplish some
part of the course objectives, we found that they rarely get the
student to think through how various marketing concepts are applied.
This deficiency, we feel is an important one since students, in the
absence of carefully applying important marketing concepts, try to
complete the case analyses without understanding the concepts. In
some instances, concepts (e.g., positioning) are used without an
understanding of what they mean and the different ways in which they
can be used. Since a vast majority of MBA students do not work in
the marketing area, we have successfully used concept papers to
alleviate the problems noted above. Each student in the Executive MBA
Marketing Strategy course
is required to write eight concept papers each focusing on an
important concept discussed in the chapter. This concept paper needs
to focus on how the concept is being used by their organization, the
manner of its implementation, and the problems the organization has
had either in using the concept, or implementing it. The concept
papers typically cannot exceed two double-spaced, typewritten pages.
These concept papers in our experience, have served several useful
purposes. First,
they have forced MBA students who do not have a marketing
background, to contact marketing personnel in their organizations to
find out how the concept is being applied. In this process, several
students have commented that they have come to develop a healthy
regard for the work that marketing department employees do and the
difficulties with which they have to contend. Secondly, students
especially in such areas as health care, financial services, and
education have recognized that the marketing of services presents
many challenges not addressed in the textbooks. Thirdly, we begin
each class session by calling on some students to briefly explain
how the concept is being applied in their organization. An
unintended benefit of this exercise is that it allows all the
students in the class to learn how organizations that are very
different from their own are applying the concept. They also learn
about other organizations they have only read about in the
newspapers. In one particularly interesting exchange, students
started comparing notes on the problems their organizations were
having in evaluating attempts to measure customer satisfaction and
most were surprised to learn of the sophisticated approach taken by
some health care organizations whose employees were in the class. With
a class size of forty students, this means reading and commenting on
forty concept papers every week. The associated clerical task of
recording all of these scores also is time consuming. The tendency
to just skim through the papers and award ten points to each should
be avoided. In order to simplify the task of the professor to some
degree we have made and enforced one rule: No late submissions
accepted and no revisions allowed. Another problem that could arise
pertains to the grading scheme used. Unless the professor is clear
about communicating expectations and enforcing them some students
might not take the assignment seriously. We have tended to be very
tough in our grading especially in the initial stages of the course
and in some extreme cases have returned a paper or two to students
with a zero in order to send a clear message regarding our
expectations. Finally, we have had cases where students disagree
with our grade. In such cases we have found it useful to show them
well written papers of students from previous classes. The key is to
continuously enforce the objective of the assignment, to understand
how a marketing concept is applied. The main lesson we have learned from this assignment is that professors need to persevere even when an assignment is not well received by students. In our case within the first two weeks we were able to establish the assignment’s usefulness. Towards the end of the course students seem to show some fatigue from all the writing and we once again had to clearly communicate our expectations to them. In the end however, course evaluation comments showed that this type of assignment was well received by the students and they found it to be a very useful learning experience. Raghu Tadepalli and Clint B. Schertzer are associate professors in the marketing department. |
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