Course Description

This course is designed to provide students with an understanding of the principles of Marketing. There is a focus on the management of marketing activities and on how marketing relates to overall organisational functionality, including the management of exchange processes between business units, consumers, and firms. It includes environmental analysis, industry and competitor analysis, objective setting, marketing strategies, and marketing mix components such as pricing, distribution, product and service development. Students explore promotion through traditional and digital marketing communication.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the importance of being marketing oriented in business practice.
• Evaluate market conditions and customers needs when forming marketing strategies.
• Describe a range of common strategies for use with each of the various Marketing mix tools: product, pricing, promotion and distribution.
• Recommend and justify an appropriate mix of such strategies to form a cohesive overall strategy to address given marketing tasks or situations.
• Use examples from current events and real-world marketing situations to apply, illustrate and discuss different marketing strategies.

Learning Experience

Introduction to marketing is a foundational subject designed to build students’ understanding of what marketing is, why it matters, and how it informs organisational decision making. The course positions marketing as more than advertising, emphasising the discipline’s role in creating value through exchange, understanding customer needs, and applying strategy across product, pricing, promotion, and distribution. It also encourages students to recognise marketing in everyday life, using familiar choices and experiences as an entry point to more formal concepts.

Designed for a fully online OUA cohort, the learning experience was structured across 12 modules with a consistent rhythm to support pacing and reduce cognitive load. Early lessons establish a shared language through clear definitions and examples, then progressively layer in analysis tools and applied decision making. A key design intent was to balance conceptual rigour with accessibility, keeping explanations practical without oversimplifying core ideas. For example, complex economic concepts such as price elasticity were taught at a “working understanding” level, prioritising application and interpretation over detailed calculation.

The course placed strong emphasis on visual communication and interaction design to support engagement and comprehension. Core frameworks such as the marketing mix (including the “four Ps”) were represented through bespoke graphics aligned to OUA style, reinforcing consistency and recognisability across the learning environment. Icons, curated videos, and purpose-built images were used to break up dense text, support scanning, and make abstract concepts easier to recall.

Interactivity was used to move students from passive reading into applied practice. For strategic analysis, students engaged with an embedded H5P activity to develop and iteratively update a SWOT analysis after completing the lesson content. This provided an immediate bridge between explanation and use, encouraging students to synthesise information into an actionable framework rather than treating it as theory-only.

Applied, research-driven practice tasks were also designed to build authentic capability in contemporary marketing contexts. In market research, students were guided through a structured activity using publicly available tools, including ABS “data by region”, Google Maps, and Google Trends, to evaluate a hypothetical pop-up business opportunity. This task modelled real-world evidence gathering, introduced digital research literacy, and reinforced the course’s focus on marketing as decision making informed by data, context, and consumer behaviour.

Overall, the learning experience combined clear conceptual scaffolding, strong visual design, and purposeful interactivity to develop students’ confidence in interpreting marketing situations and recommending practical strategies.

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