Abstract:

This article presents a pedagogical framework realized within the context of a first-year bachelor marketing course for students in the field of Business Economics at a University of Applied Sciences. It is designed to answer the brief proposed by L'Oreal Paris for its annual marketing contest, the Brandstorm (https://brandstorm.loreal.com/en), whose theme for this year is: "Crack the new codes of beauty / your playing field: AR, VR, AI, NFT, gaming & Metaverse".
Four stages are presented as follows:
(1) the creation of the concept and the didactic supports,
(2) the organization of the workshops,
(3) the feedback from the students and the reflexive analysis of the exercise and
(4) the planning of the next iterations with the integration of the improvements.

Throughout this course and the participation in an international competition, the aim is to prepare students to evolve and adapt to a VUCA world, characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

As future employees of companies that must continually adapt to the growing and increasingly rapid adoption of digital tools by consumers, today’s students must be able to regularly integrate new technologies, understand them and explore the added value uses that their sector of activity and more specifically their company can make of them. Learning to innovate in a complex and constantly changing environment are key skills for employability. The world of today is not the one in which they will have to develop their career in the next thirty years.

L'Oreal's 2023 brief forced the marketing teachers of the participating teams to address, through the usual themes of the bachelor's degree in marketing (innovation and development of new products and/or services), subjects that are not yet compulsory in a bachelor's program.
The learning context was created on the basis of the initial knowledge of the students (N=48), measured through a quantitative questionnaire taken prior to the creation of the course. The level of knowledge being low, a discovery and initiation course run over 5 consecutive weeks of 135 minutes of weekly training was consequently developed. Each week covers a specific pedagogical objective:
(1) discovery and testing
(2) innovation
(3) prototyping
(4) dissemination/communication
(5) pitch and peer review.

Upon completion of the program, a second questionnaire was distributed to the students with the aim to determine what knowledge was gained and to identify the successes or failures of the program. The teachers completed these data with their own observations and recommendations were made for the following editions.

Finally, two iterations are planned with improvements implemented based on the lessons learned, as well as on the change of context. The objective is to be able to use this approach as widely as possible in our institution. The conclusion of this article takes the form of a guide of best practices or pitfalls to avoid when using these workshops for other teachers searching for inspiration.

Keywords:

Marketing, higher education, experiential learning, active learning.