2008 - Marketing Educators' Association

LINKING MARKETING STUDENTS TO THE REAL WORLD OF GLOBAL
MARKETING: AN EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING APPROACH
Angelica Bahl and Nancy T. Frontczak, Metropolitan State College of Denver, Department of Marketing,
P.O. Box 173362, Denver, CO 80217; abahl@mscd.edu, frontczn@mscd.edu
ABSTRACT
Business school educators continue to adopt new
experiential learning methods and provide a total
educational experience that emphasizes conceptual
reasoning, problem solving skills, and preparation for
lifelong learning (AACSB, 2007). To meet demands
from the international business community, faculty
face challenges to provide students with multicultural
understanding and critical thinking skills. To assist in
these challenges, this paper describes a new
experiential learning technique called the business
proposal and compares this new technique with the
traditional case study. The goal of this study is to
measure student preferences and the learning
effectiveness of these two learning activities in an
International Marketing course, and develop
recommendations for marketing educators. The study
shows student preferences for the new international
business proposal assignment over the traditional
case study, especially in improving ability to
understand the real world of international business. In
addition, the business proposal assignment improved
students’ multicultural and critical thinking skills.
INTRODUCTION
Today, multicultural understanding, experiential
learning activities, and critical thinking skills are
important elements of marketing education. In today’s
demanding world of education, the growing variety of
educational tools and theories of the effectiveness of
teaching have made teaching globally even more
difficult for marketing educators. When looking at the
extent of the marketing literature, an educator faces
the challenge of providing multicultural understanding
to students. Mainstream marketing texts give little or
sometimes no coverage to multicultural marketing
issues. Multicultural marketing pedagogy is so
underdeveloped there is significant potential to
develop this aspect of discourse (Burton, 2005). With
globalization in many countries and industries,
multicultural knowledge and cross-cultural experience
have become extremely important for marketing
students. Only a few years ago, it was hard to find a
personal resume with multicultural expertise; now the
many multinational corporations have set up
multicultural marketing departments or required their
personnel to have multicultural skills. Are our
marketing students ready for this challenge?
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To prepare students for a real world perspective,
educators use a wide spectrum of teaching styles
and techniques, many falling into the category of
experiential learning activities (Frontczak & Kelley,
2000). Existing marketing literature indicates that
many marketing programs use a variety of
experiential learning activities, such as living case
projects (Browne, 1995), in-basket exercises
(Pearson et al., 2006), experiential learning
exercises (Gremler et al., 2000), student-driven
syllabi (Frontczak & Daughtrey, 2004), and many
others. And as a result, Karns’ research indicates
that experiential learning activities are seen as
relatively more effective (Karns, 2005, 2006). This
was also concluded by many others (Olsen, 1994;
Young, 2005; Clarke & Flanerty, 2002, Li et al.,
2007).
Other research discovered that “real world,”
personal, practical work experience can be used
to establish credibility among marketing students.
The most knowledgeable and credible educator
offers “real world” cases beyond those offered in
the textbook and prepares students for the
realities of a marketing career (Faranda & Clark,
2004). Also, since the majority of marketing
students do not have international experience, real
world exercises (such as living cases, simulations,
real business proposals, field trips and the like) in
international marketing courses can certainly
improve students’ knowledge, and in some cases,
give them actual international experience. Karns’
study explores and measures preferences for
learning activities rather than effectiveness (Karns,
2006); he also analyzed differences in learning
style dimensions by using Kolb’s model (Kolb.
1984). Marketing educators recommend that
further research should investigate how specific
learning activities influence learning outcomes
(Morrison et al., 2006), which directly relates to
this research.
The primary thrust of this study is to examine the
preparation of students for international marketing
careers. This paper presents a new experiential
learning project to link marketing students to real
world experience. The marketing literature
supports the importance of this link (Browne,1995;
Forman, 2006). This research investigates the
effect of the new teaching technique on