Every story I bring into the room came from a real organization, a real decision, and usually a real mistake. That's the gap between a textbook and an education.
If you've ever sat in a marketing class and wondered whether any of it would actually matter when you got a job, this course is built to answer that question. Not by making the theory simpler. By showing you what the theory looks like when it fails in a real organization, and what the person in the room has to do next.
I teach Principles of Marketing at the University of North Georgia in Dahlonega. My students are mostly general business majors, about 85%, with marketing majors making up the rest. Most of them are three years away from sitting inside real organizations where marketing decisions get made, get questioned, and sometimes get made badly. The highest-value thing I can give them isn't a framework. It's the ability to recognize what's actually happening and know what to do about it.
Twenty years of leading marketing functions, four of them turnarounds, built a teaching story bank that most marketing textbooks don't have: what a broken positioning actually looks like from the inside, what happens when sales and marketing stop trusting each other, what it costs when nobody is willing to say plainly that the strategy isn't working. The classroom is where those patterns get named before students encounter them in the wild.
Teaching extends beyond UNG: Visiting Expert, Industrial Design Practicum, Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2012), presenting a live business case and mentoring students through final presentations.
Every concept in the course gets a real story behind it. Not a case study from a textbook written a decade ago. A situation I was in, a decision that had to be made, and what actually happened. The course follows the Principles of Marketing curriculum using Shane Hunt's textbook as the structure. What happens inside that structure is different from what most students expect: less theory as a destination, more theory as a lens for understanding what they're already watching happen around them.
A lot of what I learned I got to then teach my supervisors at my current internship, which was cool.
The professor's firsthand testimony and her ability to put that into words made me love and enjoy the class. She has been, by far, one of the best teachers I've had in college.
In my two years here, I never thought I would be able to say that a college course was fun. She always had cool examples and real world experiences to share.
Most marketing teams don't struggle because they lack talent. They struggle because nobody has given them a shared language for what good marketing strategy actually looks like, what's broken when it isn't working, and how to have an honest conversation about it without it becoming political.
Corporate education programs address that problem differently than fractional CMO work does. The fractional CMO engagement diagnoses the specific situation and leads the rebuild. A corporate education program builds the capability inside the team so they can diagnose and rebuild on their own. One is doing it with them. The other is teaching them how.
Programs built around the MINDSET framework are in development: structured half-day and full-day sessions for marketing teams, leadership teams, and cross-functional groups. If your organization is interested in being among the first to go through one, that's a conversation worth having now.
Email me at gina@makeitwithmindset.comIf you want to be among the first to know when MINDSET workshops open for organizations, email gina@makeitwithmindset.com with the subject line “MINDSET” and I'll reach out directly when the first cohort is ready.
Tell me about your institution or team and what you're looking for. Interested in a MINDSET workshop? Mention it here.
I read every one of these personally and will reply to the email you gave me.
Prefer email? Reach me directly at gina@makeitwithmindset.com.