Team-Building Activity to Deliver Marketing Concepts: An Abstract

Abstract

Active and experiential learning has become an integrated part of modern teaching style. Changing classroom environment and increasing expectations demand proactive and engaging styles of teaching. Active and experiential learning are found to be facilitating and improving students’ learning process, and improving retention rates (Allery 2004; Dixon 1994; Frontczak and Kelly 2000; Klimoski 2005; Kolb 1984; Kolb and Kolb 2005; McLeod 2013). Active and experiential learning has been particularly important dealing with the new generation of students—Millennials—who found to exhibit high level of apathy and lack of active involvement (Drea et al. 2005; Shanahan et al. 2006). The current study is based on Kolb’s (1984) model of experiential learning defined as “the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience” (1984, p. 38). This work-in-progress study presents a team-building activity, adapted from Jon Tucker’s “The Ultimate Icebreaker and Teambuilder Guide” (2007), that has been successfully employed in delivering the concept of the Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) in business courses in two universities in Canada and Lithuania. Data are collected via self-administered online questionnaire distributed to students as well as via instructor’s observation of students’ actions during the activity and students’ post-course survey feedbacks. The final sample for the current report is comprised of 41 participants; however, the data collection is still on-going. The questionnaire was comprised of three sections, with information collected on (a) general information regarding gender, age, year of study, program, etc., (b) memorability, relevance, and the ability of the exercise to enhance understanding of the marketing concepts as well as its ability to initiate collaboration between team members via eighteen 7-point items (Elam and Spotts 2004), and (c) “take-aways” via open-ended questions. The mean values ranged between 4.07 and 5.8 indicating the overall positive attitudes towards the activity. The factor analysis produced three factors: Conceptual (α =.917), Social (α =.886), and Negative (α =.538) (the latter one was dropped due to low reliability). The results of the ANOVA and linear regression analysis provided a strong support for significant direct positive impact of both summary constructs on students’ satisfaction with the course; while only the Conceptual factor had strong direct positive impact comprehension. The preliminary results suggest that the activity is not only useful in delivering the concept of IMC, but also positively impacts the students’ satisfaction with the enrolled course. The activity is useful in motivating students to partake more actively in in-class discussions and contributes to students’ engaged reflective observations and relevant conceptualization. Hence, the activity is strongly recommended for marketing courses, in particular, and business courses, in general.