A scholarship approach to embedding creativity and sustainability in Marketing Principles curriculum

In business, creativity and innovation can be the difference between success and failure, especially in a world challenged by sustainability issues. Yet creativity and sustainability are rarely discussed with students and seldom appear as part of the formal material in tertiary marketing studies, certainly at the introductory level. This article reports on a curriculum initiative which sought to address this gap in the context of a first-year undergraduate Marketing Principles, multi-cohort course. To help warrant the rigour of the initiative, drawing on the literature, a six-step scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) theoretical framework was used to describe the initiative, and to determine its effectiveness. The investigation was informed by a multi-method study comprising descriptive analysis of 323 students’ performance scores, content analysis of 59 student groups’ preliminary marketing plans, descriptive analysis of 113 students’ attitudes (survey), and content analysis of 35 students’ post-assessment reflections. The results indicate that sustainability-oriented creativity can be successfully taught and assessed in large, first-year marketing cohorts, provided the curriculum is scaffolded and the teaching team is ‘on-board’. Further, viewing teaching and learning initiatives through the SOTL lens is a valuable way for scholarly academics to enhance their intellectual contributions to their schools, to improve student learning experience and outcomes and to help the business school faculty, as well as the marketing discipline.