Students inherit a young consumer brand and ship a four-round marketing plan — segment, brand, price, promotion — graded by a coherence engine that rewards integrated thinking over isolated cleverness.
Maps to your syllabus
The module is built around a single thesis you can lecture against — coherence beats cleverness. Students don’t learn the framework by reading it. They learn it by committing to a plan, watching the engine call out incoherence, and rewriting in the next round. The textbook then explains the mistake they already felt.
Learning outcomes
Apply STP to a defined market
Pick a segment, defend it, write the line that names the promise.
Translate brand into product
Archetype → personality → product decisions that hold the line.
Justify a pricing position
Choose a price band; show it is believable given the segment and brand.
Design an integrated launch
Mix earned, owned, paid, place — without breaking coherence.
The dependency graph is the curriculum. Round 1’s segment choice constrains Round 2’s archetype space; Round 2’s archetype constrains Round 3’s plausible price band; Round 3’s price band constrains Round 4’s media mix. Students who pick scattershot in early rounds discover their Round 4 options are narrower than their classmates’.
The Anchor
Pick a product category, choose a target customer segment, draft a positioning statement, sketch a SWOT. Round 1 sets the bar every later round is graded against.
Students submit
Segment · positioning · SWOT
The Personality
Carl Jung’s twelve brand archetypes, simplified to four. Translate the archetype into name, tagline, visual mood, and product decisions that hold the line on Round 1.
Students submit
Archetype · product mix · brand voice
The Position
Set a price point and pick a strategy — premium, penetration, every-day-low-price (EDLP), or skim. Premium against a value-led segment is the most common mistake.
Students submit
Price band · value math · promo plan
The Voice
Allocate $50K across five promotional channels. Spreading evenly is the easy mistake; coherent campaigns concentrate on the 2–3 channels that match segment and archetype.
Students submit
IMC plan · channel mix · launch calendar
Every round produces gradeable artifacts you can review in the instructor dashboard and export as a Canvas-ready CSV when you’re done grading.
The line
For ritual-driven skincare loyalists, NorthStar is the evening serum that earns its place on the shelf — because it actually does one thing and proves it in two weeks.
Specificity
88/100
Confidence
76/100
Proof
82/100
What the engine wrote
“Loyalist + skincare is canonical and the positioning earns the segment — the proof clause does the work most R1 positioning statements skip. SWOT under-weights regulatory threat, which will surface in R3.”
The Coherence Score is an aggregate of four dimensions, each calculated from the student’s own submitted artifacts. You can grade on the engine’s number, override it per-student, or run your own rubric on top — all four dimensions are visible to the student and to you.
Default weighting
Reweight in Course settings → Grading.
Segment Fit
Defensibility of the chosen segment given the product category. Did the student pick a customer the brand can actually serve?
35%
weight
Brand Coherence
Internal consistency of archetype, voice, and product decisions. Projected in R1, scored fully in R2.
25%
weight
Positioning
Specificity, confidence, and proof of the positioning line. Engine scores on syntactic and semantic markers.
25%
weight
SWOT clarity
Honest threat identification. Engine rewards naming threats that show up in later rounds.
15%
weight
The fastest way to evaluate the module is to take a guided tour of Round 1 — same brief, same decision form, same results UI your students see, prepopulated with sample inputs so you can click through and read the reveal without grading your own work. We recommend doing it before assigning.
Already adopted? Open the instructor dashboard →
Course wizard
Roster size auto-allocates sims and seats.
Individual play
Each student runs their own brand on their own schedule.
Auto-graded
Every point earned ties back to a named coherence rule.
Canvas-ready CSV
Export the full gradebook on demand.