Schoolwork as Products, Professors as Customers: A Practical Teaching Approach in Business Education

Abstract

The common perception is that only hands-on learning can help students understand the interactions between various concepts. In this article, the authors describe a method of teaching the four Ps—product, price, place, and promotion—in a marketing principles course in which the students market their coursework to the professor as the customer. The professor-as-customer paradigm is based on the Japanese Kano model, which identifies and quantifies customer expectations. In a 2-year experiment, they investigated two professors and 357 students and found that progress occurred on several nationally normed learning objectives.