Educating Marketing Students to Understand Designers’ Thought-Worlds

Abstract

Marketers and designers are likely to work together on innovation teams as they both have customer satisfaction as their end goals. Collaboration between these disciplines in innovation teams is often impaired due to the different thought-worlds that drive decision making: intuitive versus rational. To facilitate collaboration between design and marketing it is valuable to teach marketers about designers’ ways of thinking. Approaches to teaching design thinking to marketing students often focus on students becoming more creative, intuitive, and innovative themselves. However, the integration of the two disciplines does not require that marketers become designers, and vice versa, as both bring unique skills necessary for successful innovation. An educational framework is presented that aims to teach marketing students an understanding of the thought-world of design thinking rather than to become design thinkers themselves. The focus is on recognizing how the others’ approach to the same goals are complementary to their own approaches instead of being different or “wrong.” This framework is unique in aligning design thinking phases with critical thinking phases—marketing students’ dominant thinking style—through specifically chosen aictivities to scaffold the understanding of an intuitive, divergent, and creative thinking approach to the development of innovative marketing ideas.

Light Bulb Moments: Where Do Student Entrepreneurs Get Their Ideas

“…Integration of teaching creative processes should be distributed throughout the span of classes, from beginning to end, including introductory and capstone courses. The marketing education literature continues to offer a range of methods to introduce and support creativity allowing professors to choose the one which fits their style and course outcomes (e.g., Blijlevens, 2023;Krishen, 2022). Opportunity identification is essential to entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial education.…”

“…As Titus (2007) notes, businesses are clamoring for creative breakthroughs. In support of pedagogy, marketing scholars have responded by addressing creativity’s impact on course experience (Krishen, 2022), development through course design (Blijlevens, 2023; Rohm et al, 2021; Titus, 2000), and assessment in furtherance of learning outcomes (Jaskari, 2013). Much like opportunity research, this approach to understanding and supporting creativity would benefit from examination of individual interactions and engagements to understand creativity’s context.…”

Technological Tools for the Conservation and Dissemination of Valencian Design Archives

“…In addition, AVD follows a people-centred conservation approach [16] requires actions where community is actively involved [56]. In this sense, AVD is already tackling young designers as some of its main stakeholders [57]. Design students can use archives as inspiration for creative and innovative design solutions [58].…”

Educating for the Sustainable Future: A Conceptual Process for Mapping the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in Marketing Teaching Using Bloom’s Taxonomy

“…Importantly, Bloom's Taxonomy has become an accepted tool utilized within many university marketing programs (Blijlevens, 2023). There are several examples of this shown in research.…”