Effective Marketing Education for Creative Industry Practitioners

Focus: Successful educational workshops that taught marketing knowledge and skills to creative industry practitioners: videogame developers. Background/context: Higher education is a common pathway into videogame development but there are many more graduates than formal jobs (Keogh, 2023). Therefore, many graduates start their own studios to make games for a living and thus need marketing knowledge and skills for financial sustainability (Zackariasson & Dymek, 2016). However, most videogame degrees contain little marketing knowledge and the most effective way to train videogame developers remains unknown. Description: Four workshops around Australia, organised with industry, took place throughout 2024. The workshops ran for three hours using active learning with hands-on activities (Stegemann & Sutton-Brady, 2013) introducing key areas of marketing knowledge. Method: Participants were invited to complete anonymous surveys before and after the workshops to gauge their attitude towards marketing (Gardner, 1985), confidence in the marketing activities covered and if they wanted to learn more about marketing in the future. Evidence: Independent-samples t-tests were conducted to compare changes in the pre and post workshop survey responses finding a significant difference in mean scores for participants confidence in marketing. Thus, the workshops had a positive impact. Contribution: The results indicate that even short workshops can impact confidence which is important given how time poor creative practitioners and small businesses are. Universities should consider offering them to enhance student employability. The results also contribute to knowledge concerning training in the creative industries.