The one line summary of Emergent Curriculum in education is that it’s a way to plan a curriculum around a student’s interests and passions, as well as the teachers. The idea is that by tapping each, you get a more exciting and immersive learning experience and use a well developed toolkit to tactically transform everyday moments into teachable ones.
(I’m paraphrasing based on my own understanding here and will accept the emergence of this tiny bud of thought as an invitation for anyone with more direct experience to add clarity! 🙂
At any rate – this noodling made me wonder: what if a business and it’s approach to marketing was run by a group of educators following an emergent curriculum approach? What would THAT look like? One of the reasons I love working with smaller and leaner businesses is because of how quickly we can each can tap into the high voltage undercurrent of WHY the business exists. The hungry entrepreneur, the dreamy eyed change agent, the optimistic intrapraneur seeking change in a complex operation: they all live and breath their interests and passions, and they are open to creative ways of flowing that insight into the day to day. Big, boxy, political organisations have a tough time with this, and even when you do get clarity there’s very often a middle-management roadblock between high level strategies, and tactical-level KPI measurement.
So – what if the marketing research and the application of insight by way of campaigns, content and contexts was done in an “Emergent” or “Reggio” style where discovery and play were key?
This is where we return to the end-user at the centre of this whole experience. It’s their needs, wishes, and attitudes that guide us. Through play and interaction we ellicit meaning to data, and give context to insight. Not in a way that segments and subdivides as a means to understanding uniqueness, but by allowing the self expression of uniqueness a framework and an intake mechanism to drive back to the business’s operations in the first place. Sort of like how the student’s self expressed passions and interests are expertly noticed, plucked, caterred to and adapted into a lesson – deliverred uniquely and just in time to align motivations with the overall curriculm (or in the businesses case: the product, brand or key value proposition being advanced)
So I have no idea what “emergent marketing” would take form as – but to me it certainly has nothing to do with the traditional sense of development and growth of markets. Blechhh. Borrrrrinnnggggg…
As someone who deals with information architecture, the content and context of thought and value propositions, and the labeling, sorting and scheming of problems sets and idea pathways. And as someone to mention the symbolism and interaction points we deal with through the design of interfaces — it seems to me that there’s some unexplored overlap between this growing trend in education philosophy and how inbound and content marketers are putting user experiences at the centre of this stage.
These are trends that can only deepen as evidence-based marketing leads to more purposefully structured “marketecture” that centres around digital usage, and planned KPI’s. Perhaps the question can become less about what kind of script we write for the play (to persuade and sell), and more about the insights and micro-moment contexts surrounding the free-minded approach in how we come up with the script in the first place.
Sounds more enjoyable to me. What do you think?