Office Hours with Professor Omar Rodríguez-Vilá

Dr. Omar Rodríguez-Vilá is an author and award-winning Professor in the Practice of Marketing at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. Just as his own research focuses on the ways marketing firms are evolving their marketing capabilities to compete in technology led market environments, Rodríguez-Vilá is constantly looking for ways to help his students prepare for the emerging requirements of the job market. This effort has a particularly urgent sense to him as AI rapidly transforms the ways marketers connect with audiences and build campaigns.

The challenge, however, becomes adapting complex marketing concepts for graduate-level learners from many different business backgrounds. In Dr. Rodríguez-Vilá’s Marketing for MBA Students course, his student population ranges from executive MBA students to students seeking a Master of Business for Veterans and full-time MBA candidates.

With such a wide range of students in a single course, integrating traditional marketing concepts with hands-on experience for an increasingly digital-first world means thinking critically about the range of marketing choices that arise in digital environments.

“I start with helping them understand the market landscape, customers, competitors, and context,” Dr. Rodríguez-Vilá says. “But the end goal is product-market fit and for that they have to think about product features. They have to think about audiences, customer personas, needs, and of course, channels, prices, all the choices that you build into the process.”

One of the underlying goals of the course becomes “helping students integrate their knowledge about how these pieces come together,” he says.

To help connect these moving parts into a broader lesson on how individual choices create big picture marketing campaigns, Dr. Rodríguez-Vilá chose Novela’s B2B AI Marketing Simulation.

How does Novela’s AI B2B Marketing Simulation illustrate key marketing concepts?

Novela’s B2B AI Marketing Simulation was designed by experienced marketers to engage marketing students in the exact campaign creation process they’ll be hired to tackle in the business world. AI-powered decision making informs nearly every aspect of today’s B2B campaigns–From prompt engineering to AI-assisted research, content generation, audience segmentation, and retargeting. Novela’s AI B2B Marketing Simulation is the only B2B simulation on the market with built-in AI technology.

In the simulation, students develop a complete brand strategy for Workwell, an employee wellbeing platform. Guided by Ela, Novela’s one-of-a-kind AI co-pilot, students launch campaigns across LinkedIn, display, and events, then retarget audiences after identifying internal stakeholders and multiple decision-makers.

“I think that the interdependency between these choices is something that's really difficult to grasp in a traditional class,” Dr. Rodríguez-Vilá says. Novela makes it possible.

Using Novela helps augment lectures by allowing students to connect the concepts Dr. Rodríguez-Vilá teaches, using their own marketing skills and guided by his extensive marketing experience. This lecture-to-skills pipeline is one he’s found difficult to implement in the past:.

“It's hard. Conceptually, students might understand how choices feed each other or hurt the outcome when they're not thought of in a comprehensive way. But with the simulation, I think they get a deeper appreciation for what goes into marketing decisions. What level of understanding is needed about the market, and the nuance involved in details that matter such content design or channel decisions.”

Why choose the Novela AI B2B Marketing Simulation?

For Dr. Rodríguez-Vilá, choosing Novela meant easily incorporating Novela into his existing syllabus without spending a lot of time learning, or teaching, a new technology.

“I’ve experimented with different approaches, and Novela has made this simulation intuitive enough that there's not a tremendous amount of setup or preparation by required by the students.”

Novela fits easily into the section of his syllabus he calls “digital environments,” in which he teaches upper and lower funnel marketing for digital platforms.

Unlike other simulations, which require professors and students to learn how to operate the simulation before they can even begin learning marketing strategies, Novela is ready to use straight out of the box. For students, who are balancing personal lives and multiple classes, Novela’s simple, intuitive design means a greater likelihood they’ll engage with the lesson, rather than seeing the simulation as just one more hurdle to jump through for a good grade.

“If students see the simulation as an artificial exercise, they’re less likely to take it seriously. I spend maybe 15 minutes total framing the simulation, and then I just let them run with it.”

Guided by Ela, the simulation’s AI co-pilot, students can grasp the objectives and navigate the tasks easily, completing, on average, about five rounds in total.

“I stay in the classroom to answer questions, but normally they don't have a lot of questions,” Dr. Rodríguez-Vilá.

How does Novela help professors save time on course prep?

Dr. Rodríguez-Vilá’s marketing students aren’t the only ones who save time with Novela’s simple interface and guided game play. Other simulations basically require instructors to take a course just to learn to integrate simulations into their syllabus and answer student questions.

Novela provides comprehensive instructional materials for professors and students: including step-by-step guides to integrating Novela into the classroom, video tutorials, and even syllabus support for professors. For students, Novela provides pre-made welcome decks and instructional videos to guide them through game play, along with debrief decks to guide both professors and students through a thoughtful post-simulation breakdown focused on processing learning outcomes.

But while Dr. Rodríguez-Vilá, enjoys the fact that all those support materials are available, what he likes even more was that Novela is so easy-to-navigate and teach, he didn’t need them.

“I used a simulation in a different course package, and their way of helping us was 10 videos of the professor talking. I mean, it was so time-consuming and so conceptual that it made it very difficult to use.”

Ready to take your class beyond marketing concepts to real-world marketing strategy? Novela is the only simulation platform with AI built into the core learning experience, trusted by Emory, Northwestern Kellogg, Imperial College, and Columbia Business School.

Click here to schedule a live demo today!