Marketing@techedge Teaching Laboratory

Objectives: Develop materials and methods to help both current students and alumni keep up-to-date with the significant changes in IT (information technology) tools for marketing management.

Rationale: As described in the final section, there are unprecedented changes in the IT tools available to help organizations build customer satisfaction and loyalty. Current managers are having difficulty keeping abreast, and look to new recruits to provide leadership. In particular, UBC grads are expected to be able to make effective use of these tools. Given the newness of these tools, very limited teaching resources are available to help students build the necessary skills. There is a most urgent need to develop methods that can be used not only in UBC classrooms, but also to make it possible for UBC alumni to keep up with the fast pace of IT change as is consistent with a life-long learning philosophy.

Methods: As indicated in the final section, these are three IT areas of concern: [1] electronic marketing using the internet (e-Marketing), [2] Customer relationship management (CRM) and [3] exploratory statistical analysis of large databases (data mining). The purpose is to integrate all three areas into our undergraduate and MBA teaching and to facilitate alumni up-dates. The development of teaching materials will be done by focusing one MBA student on each of the three IT areas. The goal of this team will be to identify existing materials and develop new case materials. A recent MBA grad will be used to assist both student teams, and to coordinate with faculty to insure the materials and methods can be integrated into current courses.

Stanley W. Hamilton, Faculty of Commerce and Business Administration