Marketing
Training Exercises and Resources

Imagine walking into a supermarket and going to the isle dedicated to sweets and chocolates. Here, you are likely to find a section with a variety of block chocolate bars. These are often presented as a package in the form of a rectangle which are usually the same standard size. Most often people go after brands they already recognise. Or perhaps they go for certain flavours or zoom in on 85% dark chocolates and above. This narrows down the search and they quickly decide which chocolate to pick.

However, suppose you go to an upmarket supermarket or specialist chocolate shop where you are presented with many chocolate bars that you don’t recognise. A good example is going to Whole Foods supermarket (which is now owned by Amazon). If you have a local branch, pop in one day and see the chocolate section for yourself. You will see a large selection of chocolate bars that you have never seen before, all claiming to be high-quality, tasty, organic and made from beans in some tropical country. The only differentiator is the price and the design of the chocolate wrap.

This is the dilemma every chocolate manufacturer has: how to design the chocolate packaging to sell. If you were a chocolate manufacturer, you want to get this design and pricing right. In the absence of brand recognition, they are the only things you have that makes the difference between a purchase and a pass.

The aim of this exercise is to help delegates practice various aspects of design that goes into making chocolate bar packaging. We will ignore the pricing part and instead focus on design. If all prices were the same, which chocolate bar will a customer choose?

This exercise is ideal for teambuilding scenarios where delegates are involved in design or marketing. You can then cover a large set of topics under a single exercise, such as product design, teamwork, leadership, resource management, marketing and artistic design. It is also great for kids and young delegates.

You can use this exercise in art courses and focus mainly on design aspects and product packaging. In short, there are many applications and you can use the instructions provided here as a template and tailor it to your own needs.

This is a creativity exercise that encourages delegates to create a story together as a group. It is ideal for team building, acting and creativity. You can also modify the exercise to limit its scope to match specific training needs. For example, the nature of the story can be limited to current affairs so that the focus is on journalism. Alternatively, you can limit it for marketing, branding or creative story telling.

This exercise helps delegates to brainstorm how to cross sell products. It focuses on a random set of products so it is rather creative to see what marketing strategies delegates can come up with. The key point to make in this exercise is that any two products can be related to each other and this can be used as material for marketing and cross selling.

This exercise helps to develop delegates’ observational skills on advertisement and marketing and also helps them design their own ads. It creates discussions on what works and what does not in designing an advertisement. Delegates can use this knowledge to get inspired and create effective and interesting advertisements for their products.

Modern tools can provide a great insight on how certain terms have been used in the past. With the advent of search engines and in particular the ever more useful tools released by Google we can examine the index of millions of books and observe the popularity of certain terms in literature.

This exercise is meant to be an exploratory activity where delegates sit behind computers and use the tool to test out the use of various terms. The tool is known as Google Books Ngram Viewer which is the result of indexing thousands of books.

Initially, you will give delegates specific terms to research and later you can let them use the tool freely to see what insights they can come up with.

This exercise is useful for courses on marketing, branding, writing, languages and art.

This exercise is based on the use of modern tools that can give us an insight on people’s current interests. The exercise provides a template for a variety of exercises that you can conduct based on your specific training needs. Here are some applications:

• Marketing. You want to get the delegates explore the popularity of certain terms in a given market in your marketing training course.
• Team building. You want to help delegates find a particular topic to talk about and get to know each other better. The exercise provides a framework about a trending topic to discuss.
• Branding. You want to get the delegates explore the popularity of certain brands in relation with each other and see if it fits their perception. You can then focus to see what this means in practice.

Optionally you can also consider running this exercise as a competition between groups.

The ATAR acronym stands for Awareness, Trial, Availability, Repeat. It is a technique used to filter through ideas based on a number of criteria. It can be used to understand customers’ perception of a product or service. Hence, it is an ideal marketing tool. The technique can help you recognise your potential customers and to make informed decisions based on this discovery.

This is a feel-good training exercise that gets everyone involved in a creative activity. In this exercise, delegates get to create a variety of illustrations or produce crafts which resemble the logo of their company.

The creative effort is a useful team building activity that brings people closer together by working on something similar and by having a common light-hearted objective. It also makes staff feel warmer towards the company through association by working on the logo.

The results of delegates efforts will be a series of artwork produced in various styles and with different materials all resembling the logo of the company. The logos can then be then displayed in the foyer of the company where customers and visitors can observe them. It could signal that the company is a fun place to work in and that staff care about the company and are happy to be there.

This exercise is ideal for delegates who are from the same company.

This exercise helps to define the company brand more clearly by using associations. It can be used for marketing and sales, but is also useful for management and staff. The exercise is a good opportunity to illustrate what the company is and is not and which values are more important than others.

This exercise is most ideal for delegates from the same organisation.

In this exercise, delegates get to practice making a TV advertisement. The aim is for the delegates to think creatively and quickly with given resources and come up with an effective ad for a new product launch.

The exercise is useful for practicing art, marketing skills, management skills and creativity skills. The given scenario makes the exercise entertaining and realistic so the results are also meaningful.