Abstract:

It is known that creativity is a central element of Advertising success [1], being also an important asset for Marketing and Advertising professionals. When teaching Advertising to undergraduate students it is important to stimulate creativity through innovative techniques, leading the Advertising learning process in a more practical way.

This research was considered into a methodological approach developed in a classroom context with undergraduate students from the Marketing Course of the University Lusíada of Lisbon, in Portugal. While teaching Advertising to these students, it seemed important to implement techniques to enhance their creativity, such as the Mind Map, which consists of a natural organic flow that represents how individuals think and generate ideas [2]. This tool represents a graphic technique that includes ideas, words, colors, and pictures [3,4], representing ideas and their relationship between them, trough branches [5].

In order to verify if the Mind Map process had an impact on the development of Advertising campaigns considered creative, students were divided into 4 groups, where 2 used the Mind Map and 2 did not. After creating an Advertising Plan, students were able to consolidate the video. Both videos developed based on the Mind Map conception were considered creative or very creative by most of the sample, while the other 2 – even being considered creative by part of the sample – received a partial classification of neither too much nor too less creative. Additionally, two professors from ULL were invited to participate as a jury and analyze the four video campaigns selecting the most creative one, and both choose the “Businesswoman” video.

In sum, and using comparative terms, it was clear that the videos developed with the Mind Map support were considered more creative than the ones without it. This conclusion enhances the quality of Buzan’s work [6] and is in line with Pillay et al. [7], Luangkranjang [8], and Budd [9] perspectives.

Keywords:

Mind Maps, Advertising, Marketing, Creativity, Teaching methodology.