Chair, C.H. Sandage School of Business
Professor of Business Administration
Sam Walton Fellow
Graceland University, 1 University Place, Lamoni, IA 50140
Jeffery W. McElroy, Ed.D.
Principles of Marketing
Course Purpose
This course provides a decision-oriented overview of marketing management in modern organizations. The most basic objectives of the course are to provide students with a broad introduction to marketing concepts, the role of marketing in society and in the firm, and the various factors that influence marketing decision making. Students will be exposed to and expected to learn the "language of marketing" (that is, terms, concepts, and frameworks) used by practicing marketing managers.
Learning Outcomes
Students should have a solid understanding of the major decision areas under marketing responsibility, the basic interrelationships of those decision areas, and an appreciation of how to apply key frameworks and tools for analyzing customers, competition, and marketing strengths and weaknesses. In combination, then, the course should help students to develop insight about creative selection of target markets and blending decisions related to product, price, promotion, and place (i.e., the marketing mix) to meet the needs of a target market.
Reflective Statement Interpreting Course Evaluations
Overall the student evaluations are quite positive (see course evaluation summaries). The student evaluations show that I have a pretty good mix of teaching methods for this class. They like the group work, videos, commercials, games, cases, current events, real-world examples, guest speakers, lectures with power points, final project on real company, relaxed creative classroom environment, open discussion, use of technology-clickers, Microsoft Project, and of course food for the final.
Students asked to see more on social media which helped drive the development of the new Social Media Marketing major. Students also want real-world experiential learning so I added real companies for them to work with for their final marketing project. Reading the latest evaluations led me to work on encouraging more daily class participation. In Fall 2016, I overhauled the class, eliminated some individual presentations, and added additional in-class discussion activities to each chapter.