Marketing practice: a customer, a trade-off, a story that can run.

Who this track is for

Students who notice why people choose things, and who are willing to give up a clever slogan when the evidence disagrees.

Modules in a marketing flavor

Research is category and competitors. Analysis might be funnel math or simple pricing logic — still required. Consumer needs is the center. Recommendation is where to play and what not to say. Next steps is a test, not a year-long campaign fantasy.

Quality bar

Named user. Named job-to-be-done. One trade-off. One implication for the product or message. Sources for any market-size claim. No invented interviews.

What this track is not

It is not managing a live ad account unless a cohort explicitly includes that with lawful access. It is not a promise of a brand internship.

Resume language

Describe the customer question and the recommendation. Do not list “growth hacker at GVI.”

Positioning as a refusal

Positioning is what you will not claim. If the student lists every positive adjective, they have not positioned. Pick a user, a job, a reason to believe that is sourced, and a reason a different user should ignore you. That last line is adult marketing.

Then check the number: can this position survive a simple margin or density fact from module two? If not, the slogan dies. That death is the internship.

Marketing ethics on a laptop

No fake testimonials. No implied live campaign you did not run. No targeting advice that requires personal data you do not have. Public signals only. The standards page applies to cleverness too.

A marketing brief that is still an internship

Name the user, the job, the current alternative they pay for or endure, the constraint, and the decision. “Make the brand cooler” is not a brief. “Should this club speak to first-year students or to parents, given a tiny budget and public last-year attendance?” is a brief. Finishable briefs create internships. Mood boards create hobbies.

Then run the number, even a small one: if the chosen segment is half the size you hoped, does the recommendation survive? Marketing students who skip module two produce slogans. Mentors should send them back to the sheet without apology.

Close with a test: a message, an audience, a success signal, a stop rule. Campaigns that cannot fail are not plans. GVI’s entrepreneurship track shares this muscle; marketing still owns the customer sentence.