Designing a Marketing Course With Field Site Visits

Abstract

A key goal of including field site visits in marketing courses is to give business students increased interaction with industry professionals and community leaders. Site visits give students a concrete idea of how different marketing disciplines work in the business world. Business students gain greater insight into a career in marketing from this type of course. Undergraduate students learn about careers in marketing early in their college education and graduate students realize new career opportunities. In this course, students prepared for and completed two experiential site visits to businesses in the local area to reach these goals. Significant benefits of this course included building stronger relationships between the Sellinger School of Business and Management and local companies and introducing students to prospective employers. This article describes the reasoning behind the course as well as practical strategies for faculty interested in implementing site visits as an experiential teaching approach. A pilot graduate course has been completed at Loyola College in Maryland with encouraging results, and an undergraduate course with site visits is planned. Early results indicate that it is possible to incorporate site visits into any marketing course.