Aims

1.       To introduce students to themes, issues and ideas involved in marketing communications and promotional practice industries.
2.       To allow students to learn from a structured analysis of, and reflection on, marketing communications and promotional practice strategies.
3.       To enable students to develop basic key skills through practical exercises.
4.       To familiarise the student with the theories and practices underpinning marketing communications and promotional practices.

Outline Of Syllabus

The module will cover an introduction to how organisations communicate with a range of audiences and stakeholders, through effective messaging, using a range of integrated marketing communications and promotional practices to achieve a goal.

The module will explore marketing communications and promotional practices such as advertising, PR, direct marketing, sales promotion, personal selling and digital communications, while introducing concepts such as PESO, DRIP and AIDA, to demonstrate how these promotional practices work individually and together to best effect.

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

Students will have the opportunity to develop their knowledge and understanding about both the theory and practice of marketing communications and promotional practices within a professional context. Each session provides an introduction to the underlying theories and concepts of a specific marcomms area, with an exploration of how well, or not, these are articulated in the everyday world. Students will be expected to research and discuss current communication campaigns, in class, online and in their own assessment tasks.

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

The group promotional pitch will allow students to build team-working and delegation skills alongside independent learning. Students work in groups of 4-5 to research and strategise a problem in relation to a pre-set client brief. The problem will require students to critically apply knowledge and understanding in order to perform a strategic and critical analysis. The group will then rehearse and record their pitch (using software such as Powerpoint ‘narrate’) prior to live presentation in workshops. This allows students to also enhance skills in presenting promotional pitches in response to a client brief. Students will be assessed on the clarity of their communication and delivery skills. A minor percentage of the group work (10%) will be based upon the entire group pitch, with a larger 40% of the assessment grade attributed on the basis of individual student performance and their individual slides. Recordings of the entire group project should be uploaded to canvas so that students can access feedback and allow scope for enhanced accessibility/flexibility should there be any issues with the live presentation. The assessment allows students to develop skills in a conventional presentational software tool and to facilitate remote group work where necessary. This also allows students to develop/enhance their professional communication skills through live and recorded presentation.

The second assessment, the Reflexive Client -Based Report, will assess whether students have understood both the range of, and integrated use of, marketing communications tools and promotional practices available by providing them with a case study and asking them to select and justify which media they will use to solve a particular organisational objective. The second assessment helps to expand upon skills, knowledge and abilities developed in the first assessment into a more critical and developed professional-style report.

Workshops, lectures and dedicated assessment clinics will provide the setting for formative activities that help to scaffold learning so that students have practiced specific skills prior to summative assessment.