Jennifer Daniels is a practicing entrepreneurial growth advisor and ICF Professional Certified Coach who teaches marketing courses in Robinson's online B.B.A. program. In the below Q&A, learn more about her classes and how she keeps students engaged.
Jennifer Daniels
What classes do you teach as part of the Online B.B.A. program?
Buyer Behavior (MK4100)
Successful marketers consider all the mental and physical activities consumers undertake when contemplating and experiencing products and services. It’s an ongoing process that begins well before the acquisition and consumption of a product or service, and it continues through memories, attitudes and behaviors. As an applied field of study, consumer behavior is built upon the social sciences of anthropology, sociology, psychology and economics. We explore all of those in the course with the goal of enabling you as a marketer to better understand consumers and more effectively satisfy their needs.
Marketing for Entrepreneurs (MK4850)
You’ll learn and apply lean marketing approaches to validate critical business model assumptions that drive the success (or failure) of entrepreneurial ventures, start-ups and small businesses. The class operates just like a lean entrepreneurial start-up. That means the keys to success come from your active engagement in the course content, disciplined follow-through on key activity milestones and graded deliverables, and stepping out of your comfort zone with thoughtful risk taking and willingness to lean into and learn from failure.
What hands-on projects will students complete during your classes?
Buyer Behavior (MK4100)
Even though this course section is an asynchronous online class, it's still designed to be hands-on and experiential. You will craft your own consumer behavior persona to gain a better understanding of the needs, wants, motivations and values that are influencing your own mindset and behaviors as a consumer. Other hands-on assignments include a few “Learning Check-In” deliverables that blend case applications and direct consumer behavior fieldwork experiences, such as interviews and surveys, designed to apply and integrate key consumer behavior concepts. Plus, each Learning Check-In includes a short video summary component where you’ll take 45 seconds to present your key learnings, then explain why and how those insights can serve you in the future.
Finally, there’s the “In the Marketing Consultant’s Shoes” research and fieldwork project that brings together all your insights. You’ll assume the role of a marketing consultant who’s been hired by a brand of your choosing to more effectively appeal to and meet the needs of its target customers. You’ll perform comprehensive secondary and primary research with the brand’s target consumers so you can craft meaningful, relevant and evidence-based recommendations.
Marketing for Entrepreneurs (MK4850)
This fast-paced, highly experiential, hands-on course operates just like a lean entrepreneurial start-up. After learning the core principles of the business model canvas, customer discovery and traction channels, you’ll hypothesize the problems, challenges and unmet needs facing your target customers. Then you’ll segment and target early adopters to validate those assumptions through one-on-one problem validation interviews and determine if you’ve identified a problem worth solving. You’ll also work in teams with fellow co-founders (or you can remain a solopreneur) to launch your own start-up to validate your proposed solution. You’ll design, execute and analyze the effectiveness of multiple lean marketing experiments to test, validate and iterate your start-up’s business model assumptions for target customer segments, value propositions, marketing and sales traction channel strategies, revenue models, pricing options, cost structures and overall business financial projections.
What skills will students build during your classes?
Buyer Behavior (MK4100)
This course will help you build a customer-centric mindset that will strengthen your consumer engagement, empathy, relationship building, sales, marketing, leadership, and communication skills... all of which will differentiate you as a more valuable and marketable leader.
Marketing for Entrepreneurs (MK4850)
Whether you aspire to be an entrepreneur or not, your commitment to learning and growing in this course will empower you with a “founder’s” mindset and skill set that will strengthen your marketing, sales, leadership, communications, customer engagement and relationship building abilities… all of which will set you apart in today’s constantly evolving business and economic climate.
How do you keep your students engaged during online classes?
It’s all about constant and consistent communication! I use almost every aspect available in iCollege:
- I post announcements at least once a week recapping what we’ve accomplished and where we’re headed in the weeks ahead.
- Course content is clearly organized in folders that outline key activity milestones and graded deliverables for each week.
- I augment the iCollege content structure and course texts/tools with guidance videos so students can more comprehensively integrate the course concepts and applications, plus establish a more personal connection with me.
- The entire course is fully published in iCollege at the beginning of the semester so there are no surprises.
Students have access to my calendar to schedule 1:1 virtual conferences with me, so there are no limitations with static office hours that may not align with the student’s schedule. I’m also very responsive to emails and texts.
What drove you to pursue a teaching career in the marketing field?
I’ve always been fascinated by the complexities of human behavior — psychologically and sociologically — so teaching the Buyer Behavior course allows me, even as an instructor, to keep learning and growing every day. Also, throughout my corporate career in marketing and as an entrepreneur with multiple business ventures, I’ve experienced firsthand how much consumer behavior plays a role in almost every business (and personal) decision that’s made.
Entrepreneurship is in my DNA. My parents owned and operated their own small businesses, and years later I would be the founder of my own. But even while working for large companies in corporate America, I found myself integrating many of the entrepreneurial principles I witnessed in my parents’ businesses and ran my own start-up... such as experimenting with various marketing channels and product lines before scaling with larger and more expensive rollouts, pushing myself out of my comfort zone, and embracing failure as a key pathway and necessity for learning. These best practices aren’t exclusive to new business ventures!
While creating the Marketing for Entrepreneurs course, I was inspired by the insight of Ash Maurya, author of the book Running Lean who said, “Life’s too short to build something nobody wants.” That’s why I designed Marketing for Entrepreneurs to be as hands-on and experiential as possible, and why it operates just like an entrepreneurial start-up.
What do you love most about teaching at Robinson?
The diversity and creativity of the student population! Plus there are so many entrepreneurially minded (and experienced) students who truly energize me as an instructor because it allows me to curate and deliver the course experiences to have direct application to the students’ personal and professional growth well beyond their collegiate years.