Teaching Marketing

Have you ever thought about what actually goes into becoming an entrepreneur? Or how you can start your own business? Throughout my STEAM course, Entrepreneurship, we have been discussing what makes a business successful and how some businesses can improve in becoming more transparent with their consumers.

For this Action Project we had to choose a topic to teach to the class with a partner. For our presentation we focused on marketing; the action or business of promoting and selling products or services including market research and advertising. In our lesson, we focused on making the slideshow more interactive by adding images and asking the other students what they thought about the advertisement and whether it'd get there attention to buy the product/service or not. Below is an image of me and MDS, teaching the class about the research we did on marketing.

SDC, Marketing Lesson, (2019)

Preparing for the presentation didn't take a long time for my partner and I. Out of the list of options our teacher gave us, we chose marketing because we felt we could explain it the best. Marketing seems to be a pretty simple concept that a lot of people know already, it was just putting it into a lesson that was going to be teachable and interesting to the class. Trying to make a lesson that will keep students attention was probably the hardest part because we still had to give the factual information. Eventually we decided to go with giving some information first and then testing our audience after with different images of marketing techniques to see if our teaching made sense.

It was very important to me and MDS, to create a presentation that was going to be more interactive between the students. At GCE, we tend to be involved in more hands on activities, not a lot of sitting around. We decided to create a slideshow that consisted of some information in the beginning and the rest was images that got the audience more involved and having conversations about marketing.

If I had a second chance to do the project over again, I would have made another activity for the students, like Kahoot. It would force all the students to participate as well as get as much information out of our presentation as possible. Another idea I has after the fact was splitting off into groups and each make their own add and present to the class. Overall I thought our presentation went well though. The students seemed to understand the marketing concept we were teaching. 

After all the presentations, and learning about what goes into creating a business I was better prepared to create my own business idea. My interest in fashion was the first thing that came to mind when thinking about what I'd like to do for a business idea, I want to create a store that involves donating clothing to the homeless around the city of Chicago. After every three items bought in the store, one item will be donated to a local homeless shelter where our staff will help volunteer at once a week together. In making this idea a success there are plenty of things that need to be thought about. The hedge hog concept, which makes you think about what your passionate in, what you can be the best in the world at, and what drives the economic engine. Another thing to think about is who the target audience will be. Do I want to make clothing that fits all genders and all ages? How can I make this clothing accessible to everyone? These are some questions that go into starting a business.