I taught Mkt300: “Intro to Marketing” last semester. I figured I'd write down some of the highlights from my first ever teaching experience, thinking it might make for an interesting story, and also help organize this monumental event in my life into a more coherent memory.
I have been looking forward to teaching for years now, and occasionally writing notes to myself on important things I should teach my first class. These lesson-ideas usually came late at night. Here's a verbatim example of one:
"It’s good to not know who you are. College is a great time for this, and although it is uncomfortable to be in that position, you are more yourself when you don’t know who you are than when you do. Ideally, one should accept that they will never know who they are; as defining oneself through thought limits oneself." Once the class actually came around, these were obviously tough to tie into the day-to-day marketing lectures, but I found ways to work most of them in. The class usually responded well, and I was always glad I got deep on them for a minute. I can write a few of these other bonus-lessons in another note if people are interested...
While preparing the lecture for the first class, I wrote out the entire lecture and memorized every word. Then I started thinking of difficult questions they could ask me, and whenever I though of a potential question that would nail me, I deleted the slide or topic that triggered it. The class ended up lasting a half hour, 50 minutes short. I was fairly nervous. I quickly became less nervous for these classes, but probably never got to the point where my heart wasn't thumping pretty quickly when I started the class up at 8:41AM. It's a nice rush.
8:40AM class. I really thought that was going to fuck me. It probably did a little, by making the class sleepier, but it was fine. One benefit was that it made it easy to tell when I was losing the class. No matter how wrapped up you are in what you're trying to say, it's pretty obvious when 60 sleep-deprived college students lose interest.
I decided a few weeks before the first class began that I was going to spend a lot of time talking about how the class material can be applied to their efforts to market themselves. I figured my average student was probably interested in improving his prowess at meeting women and dominating job interviews. Whenever something from the class applied to these goals, I figured I’d teach them in that context, which would help them remember the material and maybe help them with these goals. Here’s one example. Again, there’s more.
For companies, what they should focus on improving and emphasize in their messages depends on what kind of loyalty their customers have. The same is true with your relationships. There are three kinds of loyalty: Head, heart, and hand. If a customer is head loyal to you, they buy your product based on a careful analysis of the alternatives and their attributes. If your girlfriend is like this, you better get to the gym and clean your shit up, or whatever you need to do to be a more desirable person. For companies, this is research & development. Heart loyalty is when they’re with you out of love. If your girlfriend is like this, a little self-improvement won’t make much of a difference. You need to go after the heart, do something romantic. For companies, this translates to marketing. Third is hand loyalty. This is low-involvement, just buying your product by hand. Companies with customers like this need to focus on distribution. That salt with the umbrella girl on it needs to be there when I buy salt, or I’ll just buy some other salt. It’s the same with your girlfriend, if she’s like this. Whenever she wants to you’re your product”, you better be there, otherwise she’ll just buy another, and probably become habitually loyal to that. I wanted to teach the class as much as I could in our short time together. I figured I know something about music, and could impart some of this knowledge on them by playing my favorite obscure music before class. I envisioned students coming up to me after class like, “who was that music you played today? Binary Star huh? That shit is AMAZING. You just changed my life.” But in reality, I think they didn’t really want to be hearing rap music at 8:30AM. Their loss. I was spinning some hot fire.
MKT300 is like the High School slut. She changes hands a lot, and she’s most people’s first. But the sheer enthusiasm with which they approach their job with her has her well-versed in some fairly advanced shit. Pretty much everyone I talk to who is farther along then me in the program has taught this course, and they’ve all added some pretty nice stuff. A great example of this is my friend Ryan’s M&Ms classroom example for segmentation:
First, make a huge bowl of M&Ms of all different kinds; regular, peanut, almond, dark, peanut butter… Have every student take a handful of M&Ms, and “segment” them into groups. Ask a few to raise their hand and describe how they segmented their market of M&Ms. They’ll all do it by color or size, or both. Ask if anyone has peanut allergies. Say something like, “While it is easiest to segment based on demographic characteristics like color and size, this is ignoring the most useful information. It’s what’s inside that counts. Especially if you have peanut allergies. For marketers, it’s generally better to segment based on attitudes than something like color.” Two other teachers were teaching MKT300 at the same time, and we were supposed to coordinate our sections and all teach the same material and give the same tests. This really limited my freedom, but saved me a ton of time that I just didn’t have that semester. One of these teachers had taught this course for years, and it was her job to meet with us noobs once a week, and tell us what we were supposed to say to go with each of the slides that had been prepared years ago by someone else. I had the impression that she didn’t really know what was supposed to be said for big chunks of the class, or at least couldn’t articulate it after not having thought about it since the previous year. This lasted for months, and I ended up saying something like “I think these meetings would be a lot more efficient if you were more prepared for them.” This lead her to tell every professor who would listen that this was the “Most offensive thing anyone has ever said to me,” me apologizing profusely, and someone else leading the meetings from then on. Drama. It had to be said though.
One of the best things about the class was that because it’s marketing, most things you say relate to an example that you can show the class. We had powerpoint slides embedded with youtube links, sometimes at least 20 per lecture. Over the years, people had found funnier and better examples. Here’s a few of my favorites.
Tolerate Mornings. Traditionally, Folgers commercials, involved men in denim staring out the window and greeting the sunrise and the coming day with open arms. However, market research told Folgers’ ad agency that people weren’t like this anymore, they were just trying to tolerate mornings, and coffee helps. Folgers made this commercial, but decided not to run it because it would send a mixed message and alienate the old-style morning-lovers. Despite this being a great commercial, this was probably the right call.
Dove True Beauty. Companies aren’t all evil. Dove seems to think that we should fix our perception of beauty, and warmed all our hearts in the process of delivering this message. It also was a huge hit for their sales, nearly doubling them in some markets. Ethical decisions generally help companies’ bottom lines actually. But if customers believe that it’s insincere, it can backfire. People start to mock it…
Another great one from this Dove campaign.
And it’s mockery.
I showed this kid break-dancing because I love this video. I think I tried to make it relevant to marketing by saying something about how you have to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Notice how the link goes to a spot in the middle of the video…that was a key breakthrough for me as a teacher.
For services, it’s good to make the intangible tangible. You want to have logos, brands, anything you can do to link your service to something grounded and memorable. Even a dance. I think I made them watch this entire video. This was a highlight for all of us. The guest lectures I organized were another highlight. I had two guest lectures come to the class and talk for about a half hour each. One was my favorite rapper, OneBeLo, who I had never met before except at his concerts years ago where I would say something like, “you’re my favorite rapper” and then shuffle off. He was excellent, just completely off the cuff insights about starting your own business and surviving in the new music industry, and I digitally recorded the class so will always have his words The other guest lecturer was my father, who, much to my surprise, the class was even more excited for because I told them he was the (retired) vice chairman of Ford. He was even better than Lo, talking about the auto industry and how to excel in the business world. He closed his lecture with quotes, which is something that I also had been doing. Very cool to see that we had the same style.
There was actually plenty of other cool parts. Getting to know some of the more interesting students, (one of them runs a company, peep http://mybandstock.com), knowing that I had an eager (or at least captive) audience to hear whatever I was learning about that week, delivering a strong blow to my stage-fright, throwing bullion cubes to people who answered questions correctly one day (very entertaining for me) , and learning about marketing ("teaching is the best way to learn"). Having people tell me I was the best teacher they’ve ever had was also pretty damn nice, maybe the nicest compliment I’ve ever received. Looking forward to doing it again.
