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Marketing Hands-on Experiences

Hands-on learning through opportunities to work on real-life projects with companies and non-for-profit organizations and participate in national case competitions. You will also get to participate in experiential education to acquire relevant and practical work experience to be optimally positioned in the future job market. Jump into our job ready courses today.

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Experiential Courses

ADMS 4211: Live-Client Marketing

Live Client Learning (LCL) is an experiential case-competition program focused on bridging the classroom with the boardroom for advanced-level marketing students. LCL arose from a need for plug-and-play talent by clients. It prepares students to enter the highly competitive world of marketing. Over the course of an intense 12-week period, two teams compete and present their solutions to a grand jury comprising clients, faculty and sponsors from diverse sectors. The net result: a roller coaster ride of discovery of potential and career pathways for students.

Divided into five modular stages, the course prepares students to solve real-world challenges.

1. The Academic Prep
Students enter a hybrid “class-boardroom-setting” where they are guided through case studies in consumer behaviour, brand management, advertising, market research, digital and retail marketing. The cases are designed to foster critical reflection on marketing successes and failures across different industries. Students prepare to apply their marketing knowledge, initiative, problem-solving abilities and creativity. We also invite industry experts to share their experiences and best practices. Students then train to use data sources tailored to the clients’ industries, which they can leverage to support their marketing solutions.
2. Client Case Briefing
Students get into live-client-interaction mode when each week for four weeks, while clients share their business challenge with the LCL teams.
3. Case Immersion
After each briefing session, students get the opportunity to interact with client(s) either on-site or virtually, taking a deep dive into their organization. They understand client expectations as well as the complexities of their business. Clients invest their time to answer each team’s inquiries, as if they were their “in-house-marketers.”
4. Case Presentations
In the four weeks following the client briefing, each team integrates their new-found client knowledge with market research and insights, applying theory into practice to present their solutions. They are judged through the lens of industry experts, in true Dragon’s Den style!
5. The Grand Finale
The Dean, marketing faculty, students, clients and sponsors of the LCL program share program experiences and applaud the program’s winners to award merit awards, co-ops and opportunities.

The program is a rich collaboration between students, clients, industry sponsors and York alumni.

Students collaborate in their respective teams to work on each client assignment, presenting their solutions in person to a jury and submitting a detailed report to each client.

We select clients based on the nature and scope of their challenge that can engage students as well as realistically tackle using their marketing smarts. In the past, the program has been supported by a rich client roster like McDonald’s, YMCA, Philips, Saatchi & Saatchi, Canada Post, J. Walter Thomson and Quesada. Each of these clients has been impressed by the calibre of students and have expressed glowing feedback of the program.

Other key industry sponsors are Environics (who provide their Analytics data exclusively to the LCL teams and train them to use the data) and Oxenham Consultants Inc. (a global HR/ talent management organization who judge and provide feedback to students for their employability)

The Course Director and a star York alumni guides and monitors the teams to ensure each client challenge is professionally addressed.

As for LCL Alumni, they have made the school proud, returning as “clients” after being hired in their industries. They are a testament to the benefits of experiential LCL as they work toward becoming movers and shakers of tomorrow.

1. Apply marketing theories to solve real-world marketing problems.

2. Gain confidence to participate in national and global marketing competitions.

3. Communicate and present go-to-market solutions to diverse audience groups: clients, senior executives, HR consultants and faculty.

4. Demonstrate initiative, drive, personal and social responsibility, integrity and accountability.

5. Extend the insights gained from live-client interaction into the workplace.

6. Enhance understanding of “what clients want” from an employability standpoint.

7. Leverage the experience gained for co-op/employment opportunities.

ADMS 3220: Applied Marketing Management

This course focuses principally on the first word of the course title, “applied”, as it seeks to first provide students with theory that will be relevant, timely, and appropriate in today’s rapidly changing marketing arenas, and then with an opportunity to apply what has been learned to the real problems of actual client organizations.

The content used in the Applied Marketing Management course comprises four main components which are layered as follows:

  1. Academic principles
    The course introduces students to intermediate and advanced marketing principles that build upon introductory concepts learned previously. It explores the application of these marketing principles for marketing planning, and in areas such as digital marketing, customer relationship management, customer experience management and the management of customer behaviours. The intent is to provide students with content relevant to their future careers in roles such as marketing management, general management, entrepreneurship or in academia.
  2. Theoretical application
    The course employs cases to show how marketing principles can be applied to advance the performance of organizations and to provide students with opportunities to apply the theory they have learned.
  3. Practical application
    Students will also have an opportunity to work with a real client organization to explore important issues that executives want addressed. This component of the course provides students with unique opportunities to develop and apply their new marketing knowledge to benefit not only the client, but also to help students be better prepared to assess and address unfamiliar marketing and marketplace problems in their future careers.
  4. Soft skills
    Students will develop “soft” skills of a non-technical nature that are best learned through experience and which are important for their future careers. These skills include working effectively in teams on client assignments, developing active listening skills, presenting to senior executives and responding to questions thoughtfully and completely.

Students will work together in groups to conduct client engagements. Each group works on a single client assignment. Clients have been chosen mainly because the nature of the challenges they want resolved align well with the course’s learning objectives, course content students will learn, the scope of the assignment and its ability to be completed effectively within a single semester. Students are provided with a practical and proven roadmap to engage with clients to understand clients’ expectations, prepare interim deliverables and present a final report to the client in-person. The Course Director monitors student team progression and provides recommendations to focus group work and help ensure that the assignment proceeds to a satisfactory conclusion.

Student groups have conducted assignments in industries as diverse as hospitality and food, health care devices, entertainment and arts, banking and investment, fashion and design, education, dental laboratory services, jewelry and watch sales and repair, online content, pet daycares and hotels, and public sector projects for municipal government. The assignments have included the development of marketing plans, the building of brands, enhancing positioning, accelerating revenues, building social media presence, focusing on priority target markets, and dealing with strategic challenges, among other issues. Clients have considered themselves well served on prior assignments and students frequently comment how much this course has benefited them especially by providing an opportunity to apply what they have learned in a “real world” setting. 

Other Opportunities

Case Competitions

Are you tough enough to play the game? Good enough to win 1000s of dollars and moonshot your career into starlight? Well then, check this fantastic national case competition organized by the Canadian Marketing League.

Cross Campus Capstone Course (C4)

Partner with students across YorkU. C4 is a place where you can apply your academic experience and work with off-campus partners to develop solutions for real-world challenges.

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LA&PS Co-op Program

Get relevant and practical job experience to position yourself optimally in the future labour market with the LA&PS Co-op Program.