University of Texas Marketing Projects

Cohort: 2018
Fellow: Jade DeKinder

Marketing is inherently an applied science and, as a result, students learn the most when they can see marketing theories, constructs, and models in action. Marketing is at the intersection of so many academic disciplines—economics, statistics, psychology, sociology, organizational theory and decision science; and to see the way in which each of these disciplines influences marketing decisions requires the real-world dynamics of marketing-decision-making in a dynamic real-world context. This is particularly the case given the rapid changes in marketing today—social media, smartphones, user-based economy and technology platforms have all changed the way we think about and interact with marketing. After teaching at McCombs for the last decade, I realized that my students walk away from my class with the greatest level of transformational learning if they practice the act of marketing, rather than just hear about it. The goal of my project is to address a current hole in the marketing curriculum while improving university outcomes by matching groups of marketing students with individuals, departments, and groups across the university who may be in need of marketing help. I would like to use my MKT 372 course (Data Analytics for Marketing) as a platform to have semester-long student projects where I match the students with groups across the university that are facing marketing challenges. The students will work on teams of 3-5 people and have the entire semester to address the marketing challenge.