A Scheme of Work for Teaching Marketing Basics (Scotland, Curriculum for Excellence)

Marketing is one of the most engaging strands of Business Studies because pupils are surrounded by it – every advert, logo and social feed is a live example. The challenge is turning that everyday familiarity into structured understanding. This scheme of work sets out a coherent six-to-eight-lesson arc for teaching the marketing basics and the marketing mix within Curriculum for Excellence, building the enterprise and analysis skills of the Broad General Education (S1–S3) and laying firm foundations for National 5 and Higher Business Management.

The learning arc

The unit moves from understanding what marketing is, to applying the four Ps, to creating a full marketing plan for a product of the pupils' own design. A ready-made resource such as Marketing Basics and the Marketing Mix gives you the case studies and templates to run this arc without building every lesson from nothing.

Lessons 1–2: What is marketing, really?

Bust the myth that marketing is just advertising. Establish it as identifying and satisfying customer needs profitably. Key tasks:

1. Pupils audit the brands they have interacted with before 9am – a surprisingly long list.
2. Sort real adverts into “informing”, “persuading” and “reminding”.
3. Define a target market for a £3 energy drink aimed at teenagers.
4. Explain the difference between a want and a need using local examples.

Lessons 3–5: The marketing mix

Take one P per lesson – Product, Price, Place, Promotion. For Price, model real strategies with Scottish examples: why a £0.99 price tag outsells £1.00, how loss leaders work in a supermarket. For Promotion, pupils analyse persuasive techniques in adverts, which pairs neatly with the enterprise thinking in Application Training – Cover Letter, CV, Interview, where pupils learn to “market” themselves to an employer using the same principles of audience and message.

Lessons 6–8: Create and pitch

Pupils design a product and build a complete marketing mix around it, culminating in a short pitch to the class. This is where analysis becomes creation – the top of the CfE skills ladder. For classes that want to see the financial side, a brief link to Accounting Basics – Journal Entries lets pupils cost their promotion and record it, connecting marketing decisions to the money that pays for them.

Where assessment fits

• Formative: exit tickets each lesson – one thing learned, one question remaining.
• Mid-unit: a structured case study with short-answer questions mirroring National 5 command words (“describe”, “explain”, “justify”).
• Summative: the product pitch, assessed on application of the four Ps against a clear rubric.
• Peer assessment: pupils score each other's pitches using the same success criteria, building evaluative skill.

Keeping it skills-focused

Curriculum for Excellence asks us to develop skills for learning, life and work, and marketing is a natural vehicle for all three. Keep insisting that pupils justify decisions rather than just describe them – “why that price, for that customer?” That habit of reasoned justification is exactly what the SQA rewards later at National 5 and Higher. Anchor every lesson in real Scottish businesses pupils recognise, and marketing will feel less like a topic to revise and more like a lens they cannot switch off.

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