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Marketing Term Paper: Craft One That Reflects Your Passion

Marketing term papers demonstrate that you can apply what the professor has presented.  They can also be fun.  This demands that they be relevant to you as well as responsive to the assignment.

Choose your marketing term paper topic wisely

• If given a choice, select a topic you find compelling.  Your work will reflect your passion.  If, for example, you love VW Bugs, Volkswagen’s history includes strategic decision points across time and several continents.
• Choose something current but not overly current.  The old saying, “Truth is the daughter of Time” applies forcefully here.  It takes time for machinations to be revealed, and have their full impact.  You need good history to intelligently discuss a product or a company’s past strategies.
• Alternatively, if considering a marketing strategy term paper for a new product/service, select less documented subjects.  This avoids your assertions being contradicted in the literature.

Creatively researching marketing term papers

Your topic will probably be addressed in only a subset of this comprehensive list of marketing journals (http://www.marketingpower.com/Community/ARC/Pages/Research/Journals/Other/default.aspx). 

• Check your institution’s holdings before committing to a subject. 
• If you need interlibrary loans, PLAN FOR LEAD TIME.

However, you may want to go outside the box in researching your marketing term paper. Going directly to the company itself is impressively proactive, and could generate job connections.  Contact information for corporate officers is often available online from:

• advocacy groups,
• Companies themselves (not Microsoft!),
• by joining LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/home?trk=hb_tab_home),
• Hoovers, a private company, sells contact data: http://www.hoovers.com/company-activities-management/sales-selling/100003933-1.html?serv=SEMGGLHOL18482246-625964846-19098697-4228594706-1&wf=70130000000LKfCAAW&ch=70130000000KhjR&num=8667043373.  Smaller companies are, not surprisingly, going to be a bit more accessible this way.

Prepare strategically:

• Review annual reports for background. 
• Practice insightful questions answerable only by organization insiders.  
• Be prepared to be satisfied with just one answer if your interviewee’s time is short (and it always is!).  
• Include all your incisive questions in the paper even if you were unable to pose them.  You could say, “Only ABC Corp would know whether XY decision was based on Z, but repeated attempts to obtain an interview were unsuccessful.”

Be scholarly

1. A term paper in Marketing follows all accepted rules for citations.  If you believe you are asserting something truly unprecedented, say something like, “This concept does not appear in the readily available literature”.
2. Although ad copy may sometimes feature informal locutions and contorted grammar, your paper should not: ever!