Sustainability Marketing Video Award 2010

Unleashing the Creative Potential of Your Students

We have been teaching about "Sustainability Marketing" for more than 10 years. Ken has taught it at several levels within Cardiff Business School in the UK and as a guest contributor to courses in other institutions, while Frank teaches it at the Technische Universität München in Germany and at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. During the summer term Frank has more than 50 students from the International Masters programme Sustainable Resource Management and the European Masters in Consumer Affairs in his class. The students come from all over the world (Asia, Africa, America, and Europe). The course is truly international and interdisciplinary.

Frank adopts the award winning text book “Sustainability Marketing: A Global Perspective” for the course (surprise, surprise!). The lectures are widely based on slides in the ‘PresentionZen’ style with a lot of pictures, which are (for the most part) available at the accompanying webpages of the text book. There is also a lot of discussion in class, based on the cases and questions presented in the book. Oral participation is part of the assessment (33%). In addition, he asks the masters students to write a short sustainability marketing case, which focuses on a selected aspect. The written assignment is also part of the assessment (33%). However, the most exciting and creative part of the assessment are the sustainability marketing videos, combined with a competition and an award (33%).

The videos are produced by groups of 3-4 students and should not run any longer than five minutes. This year in April Frank asked the student groups to focus on communications aspects of sustainability marketing (e.g. sustainable brands, labels, and greenwashing) as covered in chapter 8 of the text book. The students produced and uploaded the videos on the YouTube channel “Sustmarketing”. The videos were evaluated according to content, creativity, and style. Independent from the teacher’s evaluation there was a public choice “Sustainability Marketing Video Award”, similar to the Eurovision song contest: The videos were shown during the last lecture of the course on June 16, 2010. Altogether there were 16 videos, which were creative, original, funny, emotional, and critical! In short: It was like in the movies and great fun to watch!

After the presentation of the short video series the groups were asked to pick their three favourites, giving 3 points to the first place, 2 points for the second place, and 1 point for the third (they could rate any video except their own, of course). To increase the excitement the groups announced their favourites one by one. In 2010 the outstanding winner was a video on “Ritter Sport Organic Chocolate Branding and Communications” featuring Cinta Azwiendasari, Miriam Moreno, Emily Pröll, Maximillian Pröll (the baby), and Dana Vogel.



The runner-up was a video by Leena Heinzelmann, Stephanie Preißner, Martina Reitmeier, and Petra Tutsch presenting the case of KitKat, which is made using fair trade chocolate. Despite the fair trade label the company Nestle and their product brand KitKat are accused by Greenpeace of using palm oil from unsustainable sources, which destroys the rain forest and kills orang-utans.



The third prize went to a critical video by Ina Distel, Amaranth Mansaneth, Kristina Schreiner, and Eliabeth Torge on “Greenwashing” presenting different product categories and cases:



The three winners received certificates and a regional product (= beer!) for responsible consumption during the World Cup 2010. Hereby we would like to thank and congratulate all contributing teams! Lecturers from all over the world are free to use the videos in their class. We would love to hear how you try to unleash the creative potential of your students.