Marketing 101 Principles of Marketing

About the Textbook

Boundless Marketing

Description:  

The Boundless Marketing textbook is a college-level, introductory textbook that covers the exciting subject of Marketing. Boundless works with subject matter experts to select the best open educational resources available on the web, review the content for quality, and create introductory, college-level textbooks designed to meet the study needs of university students.

I used two chapters from this book:  Chapter 15 - Social Media Marketing and Chapter 17 - Introduction to Non-Profit Marketing.

Authors: 

• Boundless

Formats:  

This textbook is available on the web.

Cost savings:  

Students can experience significant textbook savings. Typical foundation marketing textbooks can cost up to $200 new, and this textbook is available free. Since I teach approximately 300 students per year, this is a total annual potential savings for students of $60,000.

Accessibility and diversity statement: 

Boundless has no information available about accessibility and diversity.

License:

Except where noted, content and user contributions on this textbook are under a Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 4.0. This means that you can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. 

About the Course

MKTG101: Principles of Marketing

Description: The purpose of the course is for students to understand the social and economic implications of marketing for profit and nonprofit institutions; market structure and behavior; marketing institutions; channels of distribution for consumer and industrial goods; marketing costs; pricing; and public relations. 

Prerequisites: none

GE credit: 3.0 credits

Learning outcomes:

This course is designed to help students develop a basic understanding of marketing and marketing functions.  As a course of marketing principles, it focuses on basic marketing vocabulary, principles, and strategies and builds a foundation for advanced marketing courses. 

Upon completion of this course, students should be able to:

• Understand the marketing concept and the marketing orientation in analyzing organizations and society; explain main functions of marketing; 
• Analyze and evaluate the environment in which organizations market their products, how environment may affect the effectiveness of marketing strategies; and
• Describe elements of marketing mix, analyze marketing strategies, develop market mix strategies, and explain how such strategies deliver values for customers.   

The course emphasizes an integrated marketing approach and a customer orientation, particularly how basic principles, marketing mix elements, customers, and market competition work together to create marketing synergies.

Curricular changes:

For this project, I adopted two chapters from this open textbook, Chapter 17 - Introduction to Nonprofit Marketing and Chapter 15 - Social Media Marketing, as supplemental readings for enhanced learning. As a result, I allocated significantly more time on Nonprofit Marketing in class discussions as well as designed exam questions to test students' understanding on this topic, which was very limited in the required textbook. Non-profit marketing is particularly relevant to students' job market in our area, and the addition of this chapter raised much discussion and interest in the role marketing plays in non-profit organizations. 

Chapter 15 Social Media Marketing carries more weight in our discussion of marketing mix strategies, specifically market communication strategies. I have developed a new quiz entirely focusing on this topic as well as class activities and discussions on current social media platforms and its effectiveness in marketing. 

Teaching and learning impacts:

Collaborate more with other faculty: No       
Use wider range of teaching materials: Yes
Student learning improved: Yes
Student retention improved: Unsure
Any unexpected results:  No

While I do not have formal survey/quantitative evidence to support this statement, I believe the addition of these two chapters indeed enhanced students’ learning on these two important topics that were only briefly covered in our required textbook. The fundamentals were better elaborated in the adopted textbook and examples and cases more up to date. I also heard students commenting on the feature that unfamiliar terms could be easily looked up by the clickable link in the online textbook. From my perspective, the enhanced learning was mainly due to more information and enriched content.

Sample assignment and syllabus: 

Sample Assignment
This is an extra credit quiz that was assigned during the class.

Syllabus
This is the syllabus I used for Fall 2015

Textbook Adoption

OER Adoption Process

The main motivation for adopting these two chapters of the open textbook is to provide students with quality and updated marketing education with low to no additional costs. These two chapters complement the required textbook for this course very nicely by elaborating two important topics that were only briefly discussed in the required book. In addition, this course requires a traditional textbook titled Marketing: Real People Real Choice by Pearson Publishing as well as a number of articles and market news releases from online sources.  

Student access:  

Students could access the textbook by clicking through an active link embedded in our Blackboard learning platform. The landing website allows for printing by sections and chapters as well. The textbook website also allows students to view and read chapters on their mobile devices. 

Student feedback or participation:

While there is no formal assessment of students' usage of the open textbook, I have several informal observations: 

• First, students were overwhelmingly positive and appreciative when they were informed of the OER project and its primary objective of cutting textbook costs for college students. 
• Second, several students made comments regarding the writing style being a bit dry with little visuals and real-world examples, which made it less engaging than the required textbook we use (possibly due to the particular chapter we adopted). I concur with this observation and wonder if it is possible to leverage the interactive capability of the Internet for better reader engagement. 
• Finally, some students asked about the author(s) of the online textbook and their credentials and also were curious about how the quality compared to that of traditional published textbooks.  

Mary Totton, Ph.D. 

I am an Associate Professor of Marketing at the California State University, Sacramento. I teach Marketing Principles, Marketing Management at undergraduate and graduate level. My teaching interest includes Marketing Strategies, Marketing Management, and Retail Management.

As I reflect on my own academic experience as both a student and an instructor, it is those professors who were passionate, truly care about their students, and devoted to their profession that inspired me to grow intellectually and professionally. As such, central to my teaching philosophy is customer orientation, a key marketing notion that I preach and practice in my classes. This notion manifests as my genuine concern for and continuous effort in delivering an intellectually challenging yet personally gratifying learning experience for my students. 

I believe an instructor should be not only a fountain of knowledge but a platform of support that can inspire and empower students to achieve their intellectual growth. Specifically, I attempt two goals in my teaching: enhance students’ critical thinking skills and promote intellectual diversity. Critical thinking skills allow students to move beyond information retention and into deliberating unstated assumptions and boundaries. I also believe teaching is a privilege and an opportunity to inspire and empower students and respect and promote intellectual and cultural diversity. I strive for an open and welcoming environment especially in discussing controversial issues such as ethics. Questioning and debates are always encouraged. I also attend to students’ diverse learning styles with multi-media enriched lectures.