Getting personal with marketing research: A first year teaching innovation. A Practice Report

‘Research’ can be a challenging topic for lecturers to teach, and a dry subject for students to learn. This paper presents a teaching innovation that involves first year students personally in the topic of marketing research - both as participant/producers of the research data and as clients/end-users of the marketing research. The teaching/learning innovation is based on pedagogical principles to make research theory accessible by bringing marketing research to life. It begins with personal data produced by the students, which is collated and then presented in the lectures, overlaid on a collage of the students’ ID photos to make the innovation visually engaging and to illustrate a real-life application of the marketing research process. For the students, this application that describes their own behaviours and opinions is immediately relevant. For us as teachers it is an exciting teaching activity that simultaneously demonstrates the practice, benefits, and processes of marketing research.