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The purpose of this study is to examine the potential of integrating material from the arts into postgraduate curricula to deepen students’ engagement with marketing phenomena. The authors assess the use of arts-based activities, within a broader critical pedagogy, for encouraging imaginative and analytical thinking.

The authors devised two learning activities and an interpretive method for studying their value. The activities were an individual essay connecting themes in song lyrics to marketing, and a group photography project. These were applied, within a broader, critical approach, in postgraduate modules on sustainability, ethics and critical marketing. Data collection comprised diaries kept by the teachers, open-ended feedback from students and students’ assignments.

Students showed high levels of engagement, reflexivity and depth of thought, in felt experiences of learning. Their ability to make connections not explicitly in the materials, and requiring imaginative jumps, was notable. Several reported lasting changes to their behaviour. Some found the tasks initially intimidating or, once they were more engaged, stressful or saddening.

This adds to scholarship on management education by showing the usefulness of an arts-based approach towards a transformative agenda.

It offers a template of how to draw from the arts to strengthen critical engagement upon which marketing teachers can build. It also contains practical advice on the challenges and benefits of doing so.

The authors provide evidence that this approach can enhance sensitivity and reflexivity in students, potentially producing more ethical and sustainable decisions in future.

The pedagogical interventions are novel and of value to lecturers seeking to enhance critical engagement with theory. An empirical study of an attempt to integrate arts into teaching marketing represents a promising direction, given the discipline’s creative nature.

Film has been used to teach leadership in recent decades, but a review of the literature indicates much of this work is prescriptive rather than empirical. This study sought to understand the effectiveness of film in an undergraduate leadership class by determining learner perceptions of a film analysis assignment and exploring learner ability to identify the stages of group development. A mixed-method approach was undertaken. Learners were surveyed to elicit their perceptions of an essay assignment where they analyzed the stages of group development in the film Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. In addition, their essays were subject to a content analysis to determine if learners could successfully identify the stages of group development. The survey indicated that learners enjoyed the assignment and preferred film analysis as an assessment of their understanding of group development. The content analysis indicated that learners could identify the stages of group development throughout the movie. However, there was variation in which scenes were representative of the different stages. Future research should explore the distinction between inductive and deductive approaches to content instruction and learner outcomes. Film familiarity and its impact on learner outcomes should also be investigated.