What do marketing students say about teaching staff?
Published Apr 15, 2024 · Updated Oct 12, 2025
teaching staffmarketingThey rate lecturers highly, while asking for clearer marking guidance and consistent communication. In the Teaching Staff theme of the National Student Survey (NSS), 78.3% of comments are positive with a sentiment index of +52.8, signalling a strong sector baseline. Within marketing programmes grouped under the UK CAH subject taxonomy, overall feedback is more mixed at ≈53.3% Positive and 43.0% Negative, largely because of assessment clarity and delivery issues rather than scepticism about staff expertise. As marketing often sits in Business and Management, where teaching staff sentiment sits at +46.4, this lens helps explain what students praise and what they want us to fix.
We analyse student comments, survey data and module feedback to understand how students judge effectiveness, approachability and methods. The sections below translate those perceptions into actionable steps for marketing educators.
How do lecturer attitudes and helpfulness affect engagement?
Supportive, proactive lecturers lift participation and help students sustain attention across the module. Approachability matters as much as expertise: students engage more when staff invite questions, check understanding and signpost where to get help. When staff feel distant or disinterested, motivation and attendance fall. With the strong sector baseline for teaching staff, sustaining visible high‑trust behaviours in marketing—predictable availability, constructive tone, and a steady presence across the teaching team—maintains momentum for diverse cohorts.
Which teaching methods sustain motivation in marketing?
Students respond to learning that asks them to apply concepts, not just memorise them. Live briefs, case analysis, group projects and simulations model professional practice and build confidence. Educators who iterate their sessions, use worked examples and align seminar tasks to assessment outcomes see improved engagement. As delivery quality varies in marketing, tighten structure: publish the learning aims for each week, stage activities from practice to application, and make the path from lecture to assessment explicit.
How should staff communicate and respond to build trust?
Students want predictable contact routes, quick resolution of common queries and clear expectations about when and how responses arrive. Use a single source of truth for weekly updates, keep office hours easy to find, and summarise answers to repeated questions. Explain assessment briefs, marking criteria and timelines in plain language, then reinforce these in seminars. Constructive, timely feedback that highlights what went well and what to change next time is most useful.
Where does workload flexibility matter most?
Compression around multiple deadlines drives stress and undermines quality. Offer bounded choices in assessment type or topic, coordinate submission dates across modules, and give early visibility of task size. Short extensions or staggered milestones reduce bottlenecks and allow students to plan around work and caring responsibilities. When students feel some control over how they demonstrate learning, they produce more thoughtful work and report better wellbeing.
What did the pandemic reveal about effective support?
The rapid shift online showed that timely, human contact sustains learning even when delivery changes. Virtual office hours, short check‑ins and discussion boards helped marketing students stay connected. Where remote materials and scheduling were inconsistent, students reported friction; where staff provided structure, active forums and flexible deadlines, engagement held up. The lesson persists on campus: keep communication regular, materials easy to find, and support easy to access.
How can assessment and feedback be made actionable?
Students need to understand what “good” looks like and how to reach it. Use annotated exemplars at multiple grade bands, map criteria to observable features in the work, and align in‑class tasks to those features. Calibrate markers to improve consistency, and return feedback that is specific and forward‑looking so students can apply it to the next submission. Incorporate brief peer‑review moments to surface standards and reduce anxiety.
What should marketing educators do next?
Prioritise behaviours students rate highly—approachability, timely interaction and explicit guidance—while tightening assessment clarity and course communications. Monitor sentiment by cohort and module, look for differential experiences, and close the loop with students on what changed. In short, protect the sector’s strong baseline on teaching staff by making support visible and assessment navigable in marketing.
How Student Voice Analytics helps you
Student Voice Analytics provides continuous visibility of Teaching Staff comments and tone for marketing, with drill‑downs from provider to programme and cohort. You can benchmark against peers by CAH code and student demographics, segment by mode or year of study, and generate concise, anonymised summaries for programme and quality boards. Export‑ready tables and charts make it straightforward to brief teams, evidence progress and track whether changes improve the student experience.
Request a walkthrough
Book a free Student Voice Analytics demo
See all-comment coverage, sector benchmarks, and governance packs designed for OfS quality and NSS requirements.
- All-comment coverage with HE-tuned taxonomy and sentiment.
- Versioned outputs with TEF-ready governance packs.
- Benchmarks and BI-ready exports for boards and Senate.
UK-hosted · No public LLM APIs · Most teams are live within a week
More posts on teaching staff:
- What are students saying about teaching staff in social sciences?
- Do student views of teaching staff improve construction education?
- How can psychology programmes improve teaching and learning?
- Are medical technology students satisfied with their teaching staff?