A Practical and Effective Marketing Plan Assignment for Principles of Marketing Students

Abstract

A repeated challenge for those teaching Principles of Marketing is to offer active or experiential learning settings that engage a variety of majors in a manner that helps students understand how marketing concepts and decisions should be integrated. While a number of pedagogical approaches might be used for this purpose, the student development, writing, and presentation of a marketing plan is one approach many instructors employ. However, unless properly designed and managed, marketing plan projects in the principles class can be frustrating for both the student and the instructor. This paper describes a unique marketing plan assignment using dollar store products to overcome the problems associated with alternative marketing plan assignment settings such as live clients and cases. Details for effective implementation of the plan are included as well as an evaluation of this experiential learning technique.