The marketing horizon is saturated with change; new: technology, products, processes, services and experiences, methods of: exchange, payment and distribution, communication vehicles, tools for measuring responsiveness and evaluating consumer behavior. Changes in processes require both critical thinking and creative thinking to develop new solutions. Because of its technological nature, direct marketing is severely impacted. Basic issues in direct marketing: tracking, targeting, interactivity, immediacy and analytics are all affected by technology changes and require creative thinking for the development of new processes.
In this paper we argue that direct marketing courses need to develop creative thinking skills among students. Digital story making (developing plots and themes for video), is offered as a useful activity in the direct marketing class for fostering creative thinking. Qualitative feedback from students support this claim and also suggests that story making develops other useful business skills.