Tailoring a Marketing Course for a Non-Marketing Audience: A Professional Services Marketing Course

Abstract

Understanding the strategic implications of marketing is important to non-marketing majors, just as finance, accounting, and management are important to marketing majors. The need is real to develop ways to bring integrated, cross-functional insights into the classroom. To that end, various ways have been presented to integrate business courses. Team teaching using faculty from different functional areas and combining two or more functional areas to cover relevant topics are two ways to accomplish the task. This article focuses on a third approach to integration. By using principles of market segmentation, the authors have developed a professional services marketing course that focuses on the specific needs of various non-marketing audiences. Their objective was to develop a framework for an integrative course that would provide non-majors with an understanding of what marketing of professional services requires and an appreciation of its value in the creation of new business opportunities.