From Classroom to Consultancy: Reimagining Sport Marketing Education with Briefs

One of the hardest things to teach in sport marketing is that it doesn’t happen in isolation.

Students often learn theory, but the industry works in ecosystems: multiple stakeholders, shifting pressures, and the need to deliver against client briefs. This year I wanted to close that gap, giving students the chance to work like junior consultants. Enter the mini-briefs.

A mini-brief isn’t a case study, and it isn’t a theory exercise. It’s a condensed but realistic client document, pages of context, drawn from news articles, strategic plans, and industry reporting, that asks students to make decisions. Each sits alongside the assessment outline, just like a consultancy pitch pack, and forces students to answer: what’s the problem, what matters most, and what do we do about it?

View the brief here.

At the start of the semester, students picked one of four clients - Auckland Rugby League x One NZ Warriors, Moana Pasifika , Golf New Zealand or HYROX and joined our fictional consultancy, “Clubhouse”. Across the last 7 weeks, students have moved from analysing context and researching audiences, to identifying priorities and now designing campaign ideas. Their next step is to test how those ideas could translate into viable commercial opportunities.

The early signs are strong. From our mid-semester survey:
✨ 94% of students agreed or strongly agreed the real-world context made learning more valuable.
✨ 94% agreed or strongly agreed that working with real organisations made the assessments feel more practical.

And in their own words:
“Linking it back to real organisations makes the course feel so much more practical.”
“I am enjoying learning about the broad range of the marketing industry, being able to apply theory into practical knowledge when doing our assignment with the mini-briefs.”

What’s shifted most is their writing. Many start writing essays, descriptive, theory-heavy, telling me everything they know. But a client doesn’t want that. They need priorities justified, evidence integrated, and insight framed in a way they can act on. That’s now how I give feedback, and how students are learning to write.

Next assesssment, I’ll deliberately disrupt their campaigns. They’ll get sudden client feedback or a market shift and have one week to adapt. Because that’s what the real world looks like - strategy never stays neat 👀

For me, this is about more than scaffolding an assessment. It’s about mirroring the messy, iterative reality of sport marketing in a classroom. The course is being redeveloped for 2026, but innovation never makes sense if we wait for the perfect time.

🗣️ As I redesign, I’d love to bring in more industry voices. If your organisation has a challenge and you’d like students to pitch fresh ideas back, let’s connect