Revolutionising Digital Marketing Education with Generative AI Integration: An Asynchronous Approach

The discipline of marketing has seen a significant shift toward the use of AI over the last 10 years with Generative AI such as ChatGPT accelerating impact exponentially due to its accessibility and relevance on helping meet organisation and practitioners objectives (Dell'Acqua et al., 2023). The objective of this project has been to innovatively incorporate Generative-Pre-training-Transformers (GPTs) into digital marketing education as a means to expose learners to advances in the domain but also to provide a framework for managing AI use more effectively. The pilot focused on targeting enterprises in tourism in developing countries.
This project supports learners with varying educational experiences in using Generative AI and is being delivered intercontinental. An initial online on-boarding process explored the digital marketing needs, competencies and prior AI experience of the learners. This was followed by an asynchronous interactive workshop (click here) to introduce learners to AI in context and its application to shape strategy. Specific examples included defining value propositions, generating content and improving search engine optimisation (SEO).
3rd party GPTs focused on the marketing challenges outlined above and were integrated into the asynchronous online learning. A bespoke ‘marketing strategist’ GPT was co-developed with a world leading Digital Marketing author (Smith, 2022) and introduced to students as support in preparation for the final workshops in exploring building strategy through the SOSTAC framework (Chaffey and Smith, 2022) which provided the scaffolding for the learner’s overall strategy development.
Students piloting the experience highlighted a “mind blowing impact” and of the experience as an “eye opening encounter” with AI through exploring the use cases. After recently launching, an example of initial feedback was ”this is amazing! Liked the introduction and how the learning will be done. its very impressive way that you are delivering the learning materials and makes it easy to understand.”