Using marketing simulation games are a great way of engaging students in the classroom.
And given that marketing is a profession that is built around competition and challenges, then simulation and other games are a natural fit to the curriculum.
Since I became a university lecturer many years ago, I always incorporated games and other fun teaching tools in the classroom, usually with great success.
On Great Ideas for Teaching Marketing you will finds lots of great sim games, other teaching games, as well as tools and activities to engage your students and deepen their understanding of the material.
Let’s take a look at some of the materials available on Great Ideas…
Our Choice of Marketing Simulation Games
There are three marketing sim games built around a central marketplace that is visualized by a perceptual (positioning) map.
They are designed to progress your students through an array of marketing concepts and competitive decision making. The first introductory sim game is free, fun, and easy to play.
This first game has been designed to run around 1-2 hours, and it brings in the key marketing topics of:
- Segmenting markets
- Selecting target markets
- Positioning and differentiation
- Attacking or avoiding competition
- Product management
- And various basic marketing metrics
Click here for more information and to download the game for free
There are also two marketing sim games for GITM members, one at a more advanced level, and one at expert level for more senior students.
Both of these marketing sim games are more complex game and required more analysis and decision time.
For more information, please visit…
- Advanced Positioning Simulation Game
- Expert-level Marketing Sim Game
- Example Screenshots of the Expert-level Sim Game
- Our Choice of Sim Games
- Advantages of Our Sim Games
Other Marketing Teaching Games and Tools
The Great Ideas website has more than a dozen other games and tools for teaching marketing, as well as 100’s of teaching activities and exercises. Here is brief selection…
- This is a free marketing game that requires students working in teams to design their own pizza store and compete with other student groups. Available in an interactive and non-interactive version. Ideal for teaching the full marketing mix.
Interactive Marketing (Trading) Game
- This is a great learning game to play with your marketing and business students. It is provided free and is highly engaging. It gets student teams moving around and trading and negotiating with others. And while teams are encourage to make good deals, winning teams usually have a long-term win-win outlook.
- A revision crossword for an array of marketing terms and definitions – ideal for reinforcing terms at the end of term, and a great team-based activity.
Product Mix MCQ Revision VIDEO
- This is a 20 multiple-choice question video quiz on the PRODUCT MIX. It is a fun and interactive approach to revision for students, and a helpful insight for instructors on which new product topics need further explanation and discussion.
Marketing Mix Digital Escape Room
- This business is in a terrible mess and they need your students’ marketing expertise to help turnaround our business and start making more money. Your students have come highly recommended because they know so much about marketing. Can they escape?
- Also see… Digital Escape Rooms: Getting Started
Fun Approach to Cluster Analysis
- Making cluster analysis fun and easy to understand? Sure, why not? This is a good task to get students working with simple data and seeing how market segments can be formed. But note that students will need access to Excel to undertake this activity.
- This is a free SWOT analysis Excel tool, which is simple and easy to use for students to prepare detailed SWOTs. Also ideal for student assignments and reports.
Creating Customer Journey Maps (Student Tool and Tasks)
- In this task, students download and use the free customer journey map (CJM) Excel template to develop CJM’s for different personas.
- This is a free tool for your students to use to make Gantt Charts using an easy-to-use Excel template. Ideal for project planning and input into marketing plans and other assessment tasks.
Lots of Choices for Teaching Marketing
As way of background information, the Great Ideas for Teaching Marketing website was launched in 2012 as a service to give instructors a selection of teaching activities and worksheets. And since that time, the site has steadily grown to now contain more than over 350 teaching activities, tools, games, tips, and ideas.
Please check out…
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