Marketing education often relies on case studies where the outcome is already known. Students analyse decisions with the benefit of hindsight, which can make it harder to understand how those decisions are made in real time.
'Professor's Picks' is a series of teaching resources by The Financial Times that Laura Chamberlain, Professor of Marketing contributes to. Each piece takes a current business story and provides conceptual framing, discussion questions and classroom applications that educators can use immediately. These aim to bridge the gap between academic rigour and real-world relevance, giving both educators and students teaching material that feels genuinely current and alive.
The aim is to bridge the gap between academic rigour and real-world relevance, giving both educators and students material that feels current and alive. The approach has also been explored in a feature article for the Financial Times, which sets out how and why Professor’s Picks is used in the MBA classroom, alongside the pedagogical thinking behind it.
Read the Financial Times article here
This now forms a core part of our teaching on the Executive MBA Marketing module. Rather than analysing completed cases, students work with stories where outcomes are still unfolding. In one session, a discussion around matcha latte trends quickly inspired debate, as students from different industries and regions challenged assumptions and brought their own experience into the conversation. The direction is not always predictable. That is part of the learning.
Students arrive with their own views, and the classroom becomes the place where those views are tested against theory, evidence, and the perspectives of 40 senior professionals spanning industries and continents.
The teaching creates space for reflection and action to come together, supported by research into how marketing education can evolve. The impact of this is that students develop a different set of skills from traditional case-based learning. They learn to make judgements with incomplete information, weigh competing priorities, and defend their thinking when multiple paths seem viable.
As one student reflected, "It was so valuable to take current case studies and apply our learning in real time."
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