Jane Thomas Helps Students Navigate Marketing World

To help her students anticipate the fluctuating needs of consumers, Professor Jane Thomas isn’t afraid to get creative.

The 2008 Kinard Award-winning professor pushes students in her Marketing 653 class to “step out of their box” by creating projects different from traditional M.B.A. coursework.

In the past, she’s asked students to select three magazines they’d never read, consider the publications’ audiences and write about the readers’ consumer journeys, or to examine the layers in a symphony and pair the piece with a TV commercial. This semester, her students have worked in teams with clients from Harris-Teeter and Frugal MacDoogal, a Fort Mill, S.C.-based wine/liquor warehouse, to create marketing campaigns using social networking media like Twitter and Facebook.

All the projects, Thomas said, serve two key purposes: to encourage her students to be creative and to show them that “marketing is more than advertising and creating a product.”

“Marketing changes so quickly and so often because we’re dealing with consumers, and you really have to change what you’re doing and how you’re doing it frequently,” said Thomas, who joined the Winthrop faculty in 1989. The projects also allow marketing majors the opportunity to work with real clients – something students like Margaret Duncan appreciate.

“Working with real clients gives us a glimpse of real-life work experiences,” said Duncan, an M.B.A. student.

Thomas, whose own research projects include studying ritualistic behavior in late-night Walmart shoppers and the fashion behaviors of women over the age of 60, said she wants her students to understand the complexity of consumer needs.

“I want them to see that all consumers are on a journey. The students’ job is to determine what journey the consumers are on and match up products and services with those journeys,” she said.