A Unit Plan for Teaching Marketing Basics (TAS, TASC-Aligned)

Marketing is a topic Tasmanian students already half-understand — they are marketed to every time they open a screen. That gives you momentum, but momentum needs a structure. This unit overview lays out a sequenced plan for teaching marketing basics and the marketing mix in a Business and Enterprise class, with a sense of how many lessons each phase needs and where assessment fits. It works within the Australian Curriculum as delivered in Tasmania and builds capabilities that carry through to the TCE.

The learning arc: roughly 10–12 lessons

The unit moves from noticing marketing, to naming its parts, to producing it. Plan for three phases: awareness (two to three lessons), the marketing mix (five to six lessons), and an applied campaign (three to four lessons). A ready-to-teach spine such as Marketing Basics and the Marketing Mix keeps the mix logically sequenced so you can concentrate on adapting examples to a Tasmanian context — local tourism, produce and small business are gold here.

Phase 1: seeing marketing everywhere (lessons 1–3)

Begin with a decoding exercise. Students bring in an advertisement and reverse-engineer what it is trying to do. For Years 7–10, this builds the Critical and Creative Thinking capability and gives you a shared vocabulary to formalise next. Key moves:

• Audit the ads students saw on the way to school.
• Identify the target audience for three contrasting products.
• Distinguish a want from a need in advertising language.
• Draft a working definition of "marketing" as a class.

Phase 2: the marketing mix (lessons 4–9)

Teach the four Ps deliberately, one focus at a time — Product, Price, Place, Promotion — then bring them together. Use AUD pricing in every example so the numbers feel real: what does it cost to launch a $6 iced coffee against a $4 competitor? Because marketing decisions are financial decisions, weaving in ideas from Accounting Basics – Journal Entries helps students see how pricing and promotion show up in a business's records, which strengthens the numeracy dimension the Tasmanian achievement standards value.

Where assessment fits

Place the summative task at the start of Phase 3, after a formative pitch with feedback. A "develop a marketing campaign for a Tasmanian product" project is the natural choice — it lets students apply the full mix and produce something tangible. Use a rubric aligned to the Australian Curriculum achievement standard so grades feed cleanly into TASC-aligned reporting.

Phase 3: pitch and reflect (lessons 10–12)

Students present their campaigns and field questions from peers acting as investors. Since presenting and self-presentation are close cousins, the interview and communication skills in Application Training – Cover Letter, CV, Interview transfer directly and boost the professionalism of the pitches. Finish with a short reflection on which element of the mix mattered most and why, which gives you clean evidence of understanding for your reporting. Sequenced this way, marketing basics becomes a unit where Tasmanian students not only understand persuasion but can wield it responsibly.

A note on keeping it local

The single biggest lift you can give this unit is grounding every example in Tasmania. Students who have watched a local cafe, market stall or tourism operator up close will bring real insight to the marketing mix that no textbook brand can match. Encourage them to interview a family member or local trader about how they attract customers, and the four Ps stop being jargon and start describing the world they already live in.

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