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!