Marketing is all about creating relationships with customers. While students aren’t customers, professors can still learn a lot from the way marketers engage with their target audience and position their message. Dr. Barbi Honeycutt and I discuss this on her Lecture Breakers podcast.
Below is the breakdown of the interview. Feel free to scroll to the parts that interest you.
04:00 How marketing shaped my teaching
07:03 How to apply the marketer’s mindset to students
13:05 Planning a lecture using the “one-sentence lesson plan”
23:00 The balance between marketing and teaching
26:25 Marketers understand that people respond to things that are novel, relevant, and/or concrete
28:56 How professors can apply the above insight to their teaching: it’s all about the messaging
30:15 “We are curators of information” (It’s about how we package content)
34:14 What works for children work equally well for adult students
37:00 What to do when you have to teach lots of content
39:20 Find opportunities to get information OUT of students’ brains, not into their brains
43:50 Assessments: not just for tests and papers
45:40 Leveraging tech tools like Pear Deck, PollEverywhere, Flipgrid, and Padlet into instruction to get 100% participation
52:45 Talking about new book, Presenting: The Professor’s Guide to Powerful Communication
54:35 Insight #1: Start presentations with the purpose (not some boring intro)
56:52 “We learn new things better when it’s anchored to something familiar.”
57:32 Insight #2: Distill your slides and then distribute them
58:10 Apply the “Finger Snap Test” to your slides to see if they’re easy to get
1:01:10 A few of my favorite marketing books that apply to teaching: Seth Godin’s This is Marketing and Purple Cow; Donald Miller’s StoryBrand)
Again, click HERE to listen to the podcast.
Comments? I’d love to hear them below!
I’m a huge fan of insight #1 about incorporating “the why” into presentations! It makes so much sense, rather than just jumping into the boring introductions. Also thanks for the practical ideas in terms of applying marketing to teaching. Very helpful!