Towards the Systematic Development of Marketing Students’ Creativity

Abstract

Many university marketing students feel uncomfortable about developing creative thinking skills during college. However, they will soon graduate and face a need to utilize their creative abilities and contribute to their organizations. Therefore, this article provides a wide range of strategies to develop students’ creative abilities in marketing classes. It uses Gagné’s classical Nine Instructional Events (i.e., Gagné et al., 2005) to develop the strategies because Gagné systematically and comprehensively examines how to develop effective instructional stages across the entire learning process. The article also focuses on developing specific strategies to help students build creative competencies for very different teaching modes, such as asynchronous and synchronous online, HyFlex, and conventional face-to-face classes. By developing strategies for different modes, the instructor will be able to have comparative insight into how to adjust marketing courses to maximally stimulate students’ creativity, regardless of the type of course.