Enhancing Creative Confidence in Marketing Pedagogy with Design Thinking Annetta Grant Markets, Innovation, and Design, Freeman College of Management, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, USA ABSTRACT Creative confidence is a necessary and valuable skill to prepare students for marketing careers. Marketers need to be trained to offer creative solutions to enhance marketing offerings. To help address this need, the aim of this paper is to provide logistical instructions for a class module that enhances students’ creative confidence through design thinking, which can be implemented effectively in one class. Findings from 45 student pre- and post-module surveys on the efficacy of this teaching module indicate that the module increases students’ creative confidence. A detailed implementation plan is provided for educators to use in undergraduate Principles of Marketing, Consumer Behavior, New Product Development, Marketing Strategy, or other market- ing courses where neither students nor instructors need prior design thinking knowledge. This module can be adapted to synchronous and asynchronous modalities. Introduction Creative confidence, or “one’s own trust in his (sic) creative problem-solving abilities” (Meinel & Leifer, 2012, p. 5), is an essential skill for marketers and mar- keting students. Creative confidence bolsters marketers’ and students’ ability to creatively identify, formulate, and solve problems. This is a skill highly valued by employers (Puccio, 2017; van Laar et al., 2020; Yeoh, 2019), and one that is a high priority for marketing education (Finch et al., 2012; Jaskari, 2013; Ramocki, 2014). In the face of rising artificial intelligence solu- tions, marketers’ creative skills are increasingly valuable (Elhajjar et al., 2021). As marketing educators, continu- ing to enhance students’ creative skills is imperative. Creative confidence can be enhanced by the design thinking methodology (Chen & Venkatesh, 2013; Kelley & Kelley, 2013). Yet, incorporating the develop- ment of any creative skills into established courses con- tinues to present an ongoing challenge for educators (Dorland, 2023; Schlee & Harich, 2014). Teaching crea- tive skills is difficult; due to students’ perceptions of outcome uncertainty and fear of failure, it is often met with barriers to student engagement (Anderson, 2006; Krishen & Kirkendall, 2016) and given the difficulty in measuring creativity, instructors may find it challenging to incorporate in courses (Jaskari, 2013; Robinson, 2011). Although many marketing education resources provide clear examples of how to incorporate design thinking into the marketing curriculum (c.f. Chen et al., 2018; Dorland, 2023; Xu et al., 2023; Zarzosa, 2018, 2022), with a few exceptions (Anderson, 2006; Blocker, 2023; Chen et al., 2018), the the majority of these examples require several classes or an entire seme- ster to implement effectively. Given educators’ already demanding amount of material to cover, the pedagogi- cal question remains: how might an educator boost students’ creative confidence through design thinking in one class? Therefore, the aim of this paper is to provide logis- tical instructions for a class module that enhances stu- dents’ creative confidence through design thinking, which can be implemented effectively in one class. This module can be adapted for synchronous or asyn- chronous online delivery. Students can complete this module without prior marketing knowledge, and edu- cators can lead this module with no design thinking experience. Minimizing class time commitment lowers the barrier to adopting design thinking to enhance stu- dents’ creative confidence, allowing more students the opportunity for creative skill development. This paper extends the small number of studies that incorporate design thinking into one class (Anderson, 2006; Blocker, 2023; Chen et al., 2018) by offering a broader variety of techniques for building creative confidence – e.g., inter- viewing for empathy, and creating bug lists. This paper outlines a pedagogical approach that may be of interest to marketing educators interested in enhancing their students’ creative confidence. Assessment data from 45 students who completed a pre- and post-module survey CONTACT Annetta Grant annetta.grant@bucknell.edu Markets, Innovation, and Design ,Freeman College of ManagementBucknell University, 1 Dent Drive Lewisburg, PA 17837, USA MARKETING EDUCATION REVIEW https://doi.org/10.1080/10528008.2024.2389052 © 2024 Society for Marketing Advances