Principles of Marketing, Advertising, & Sales

This one-semester elective course is intended as a practical, hands-on guide to help you understand the role of marketing, advertising, and sales promotion in business.

The course is structured into lessons and course activities as follows:

• The first three lessons provide an introduction to the functions within a typical business firm—finance, operations, marketing, and human resources. The emphasis is on marketing and finance functions, both of which are important for students to gain a fuller understanding of the concepts discussed in subsequent lessons.
• The next four lessons focus on the marketing function. Students will learn about product development, consumer behavior, pricing methodologies, product positioning, and related marketing concepts.
• The next four lessons are about the advertising industry. Students will learn about advertising operations (how advertising is created); integrated marketing communication (including events and sales promotion); tracking (the process used by agencies and clients to evaluate advertising campaigns); and marketing intelligence (which involves systematic gathering of market data.)
• The next lesson explains how organizations make buying decisions. This lesson provides a foundation for the next lesson, which is about selling skills. Students are expected to know and apply their understanding of organizational buying and selling strategies in the context of selling media space.
• The last two lessons in this course teach soft skills required for a career in marketing and advertising. These skills relate to leadership, team management, teamwork, time management, and work ethics.

You will submit the Course Activity documents to your teacher, and you will grade your work in the Lesson Activities by comparing them with sample responses. Each lesson also has a multiple-choice mastery test. A multiple-choice end-of-semester test completes the course.

The Course Activities (submitted to the teacher) and the Lesson Activities (self-checked) are major components of this course. They will guide your learning as you work through this course. In particular, the last of the seven activities will help you identify possible career paths and key skills required for a career in finance.