Abstract
Both employers and higher education institutes acknowledge creativity as a critical skill that all marketing graduates need to be equipped with when entering the job market. Creativity needs to exist within the marketing curriculum and be regarded as an integral part of the academic programmes offered at business schools. Whilst scholarly attempts have been made to find ways of incorporating creativity within the formal training at universities, many scholars acknowledge that creativity in marketing education has received little attention from researchers. This chapter highlights the importance of creative thinking for marketing and reviews the literature to provide a synthesis of the leading models for learning and teaching creativity in marketing modules.
TopIntroduction
“Everything you can imagine is real.” -- Pablo Picasso
“I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking.” -- Albert Einstein
Human beings are inherently creative. People find different ways to solve daily problems from a young age, and for most people, creativity comes naturally. Accordingly, creativity is neither foreign nor novel to students. Students come to education programs with a life history of creativity, whether manifested in the use of the Internet, various extracurricular pursuits, or even, occasionally, the classroom (Livingston, 2010). From a marketing education perspective, being systematically able to generate new ideas on doing marketing activities in different ways has to be the central theme that all the marketing curricula revolve around. Calls for teaching creativity throughout the marketing programmes is not something new (e.g., Ramocki, 1994). Besides, an educational system that teaches its students to conform to the curriculum and primarily instructs students to follow the ideas of others could be outmoded in a world where creativity is a crucial competitive advantage (Byrge & Gómez, 2019). Therefore, this chapter provides useful and implementable insights into curriculum design and assessment that educators, students, and marketing employers will find beneficial.
It is important to distinguish between teaching creatively and teaching for creativity in its characterisation of creative teaching. The former is defined as ‘using imaginative approaches to make learning more interesting and effective’. Teaching for creativity is defined as forms of teaching that are intended to develop young people own creative thinking or behaviour (Jeffrey & Craft, 2010). This chapter focuses on teaching for creativity. Students need to be repeatedly reminded and shown how to be creative, to integrate material across subject areas, to question their own assumptions, and to imagine other viewpoints and possibilities (DeHaan, 2009).
This chapter examines the need for rethinking the role of creativity marketing education as well as the integration of creativity within the marketing curriculum. In doing so, we take the stance that marketing education has a role to play in developing global citizens. This chapter is an effort to critically review historic and modern styles for teaching creativity in marketing programmes to provide new guidelines for scholarship and practice. Such a review is important given that employability skills are more important to an organisation when recruiting than the specific occupational, technical or academic skills associated with an academic qualification (Harwood & Liu, 2019). Furthermore, as universities around the world increasingly turn to the discourse of ‘global citizenship’ to foster the production and transmission of knowledge across borders and explore new transnational research and student markets in the global economy (Rhoads & Szelényi, 2011), universities are increasing skilling their students to meet this imperative. One such skill is creativity which is deemed critical to organisational survival and effectiveness (Dong, Bartol, Zhang, & Li, 2017). Indeed, creativity may be useful, from a marketing viewpoint, in creating global brands (Grewal, Kaplan, & Wiegman, 2005, p. 9).
TopWhat Is Creativity?
“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.” – Albert Einstein
“To create is always to do something new.” -- Martin Luther
“The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.” -- Albert Einstein
Key Terms in this Chapter
Creativity: It revolves around the ability to think of tasks and problems in new and different ways and to develop fresh ideas with imagination. It allows people to solve complex problems and find exciting ways to tackle tasks and duties. Creativity is best defined as the degree to which an employee demonstrates new ideas or applications for activities and solutions at work.
Creative Marketing Breakthrough Model (CMB): This is a model developed by Titus (2007) that comes within reach of creative marketing as a problem-solving activity with the aim of generating creative marketing breakthroughs.
Geneplore Models: It deems creativity repetitious, rotating between two processes, Generative and Exploratory.
MAP Model: Stands for “metaphor, analogy, and pre-inventive form” Model. MAP incorporates the Analogous Systems and Geneplore Models, in conjunction with the essential concepts of the flexibility of lateral associative schematic hierarchy and high-road transfer.
Analogous Systems Model: It shows how regular analogies can be developed into systems that assist in achieving creative depth on different conditions.
Divergent Thinking: It is the use of imagination to find multiple answers or ideas to one question. Whilst convergent thinking uses logic to find one good answer or idea to one question.