In at least two of my units throughout my marketing degree I’ve been asked to develop a marketing plan as a piece of major assessment. This degree, for the most part, and particularly these units, is designed to teach people how to be marketers. Or as I prefer to call them; clients.

But in both cases, the assessment involved putting together a campaign. Any assignment that said, “We’ll get our advertising agency to develop and build a creative strategy” would have failed, Instead, students were required to develop creative (as the client), and in most cases without any kind of strategy.

Coming from the arrogant advertising side, is this not giving students the wrong idea of how things work?

Do these students go on to become that client who gets way too involved with the creative? Or comes up with an idea early on and pushes it from the start? Or perhaps they’ll simply be unwilling to pay for strategy because they’ve never heard of it before?

Anyway, I think the way marketing is taught is the reason to blame for poor client behavior. Ironically, the poor campaign that results is usually blamed on the agency.

And on a side note, I wonder if media peeps have similar feelings.