People sometimes ask how I came to be so interested in Millennial Marketing. It wasn’t a conscious thing, I started teaching Marketing at University of Notre Dame and was struck by how different the students were from my generation. I didn’t even know they were called Millennials, I just knew I couldn’t teach them the way I was taught. I wrote about my experience for Ad Age, “Clued In or Clueless: What Marketing Students Don’t Know About Marketing” and “Get the Best Out of Millennials by Tweaking Habits”. After nearly 200 Millennial Marketing blog posts , I am still learning and writing new things about Millennials every day. (For links to pdf versions of the articles, visit brandamplitude.com/whitepapers

An article, titled ‘How Tweet It is To Teach at Notre Dame’, appeared today in ND Today, an internal magazine for Notre Dame employees. I am printing it in entirety for those who might be interested in my reflections on what a privelege it is to teach Millennials marketing:

If you want to talk to this generation of young people, you’ve got to speak their language. That’s why Carol Phillips, a marketing instructor in the undergraduate and MBA programs in the Mendoza College of Business, blogs, tweets and texts like a 20-something.

“The Millennials are a passion of mine,” says Phillips, referring to the term that has replaced “Generation Y” to describe the offspring of Baby Boomers. “This generation is so different. They’re very civic-minded. Their values are not like ours; they are very team-oriented, social and cause-oriented. They are about making a difference and giving back. It is so admirable.”

They also, of course, are quite tech-savvy, which is why Phillips stays almost constantly plugged in to social media via her own blog, Twitter (@Carol_Phillips for those who tweet), Facebook and other new media as an avenue to reach the younger set.

How she came to teach millennials at Notre Dame was “a total accident,” says Phillips, who has also kept her “day job” as president and owner of the Michigan-based brand strategy consulting firm Brand Amplitude, LLC. Her teaching career was launched in 2003 after she was asked by longtime Mendoza faculty member Jack Kennedy to serve as a judge for a project in one of his courses. The two struck up a friendship and Kennedy suggested that she and Notre Dame might benefit from having her on the faculty.

“It’s a lot harder than it looks,” Phillips says of her work in the classroom, admitting that in the beginning she, the teacher, had a lot to learn. “I thought we were going to interact the way we interact in business.”

Not so, especially, as she first found out, when it comes to the dress code.
“I learned very quickly that it’s different. I was going to require business attire,” she laughs. “That went by the wayside in the first class.”

Phillips teaches two courses, an introduction to marketing for sophomores, and brand strategy for MBA students. She enjoys both, but for different reasons.
“With the MBAs, most of them have some work experience, so they give back to me in the sense of ideas and an exchange,” she says of the graduate students. “With the sophomores, it’s more the reward of watching them get it. Most of them aren’t going to be marketing majors, but every semester a couple of them go, ‘Wow, I had no idea; I thought marketing was just advertising,’ and that’s exciting.”

For Phillips, teaching has very much been a two-way street. Her students benefit from her expertise as a businesswoman, as well as her connections. She’s brought in such classroom speakers as the chief operating officers of Blockbuster and Orbitz, as well as higher-ups from such success stories as Facebook, thanks to her outside working relationships. In return, she has access to her own focus groups in the form of these Notre Dame Millennials.
“I gain a line of sight into young people,” she explains, “which is very beneficial in my work.”

Acknowledging that Notre Dame students are somewhat uniquely talented and ambitious among young people, what she’s learned here in the classroom gives her cause for optimism about this generation.
“I think it’s going to just be fascinating to watch them,” she says. “And I wouldn’t have known any of this without teaching. It’s a privilege to be here.”

For those who might be interested, you can still see the class blog my MBA Brand Strategy class created last semester.

Go Irish!