Teacher: Dr Stephanie Huang is Associate Professor in Marketing and Associate Dean (Curriculum and Learning, Undergraduate) at Macquarie Business School. Her research focuses on marketing strategy and the dynamics and evolution of trust, consumer vulnerability and wellbeing. In 2023 she is teaching a postgraduate unit on Marketing Communications.
Groundwork: Stephanie (pictured above) received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Fudan University in China, and a PhD in Marketing from the University of New South Wales. She joined Macquarie University in 2011. Her work has been published in many leading marketing journals.
Gold stars: Highly Commended in the 2021 student-nominated Vice Chancellor’s Learning and Teaching Awards. Recipient of the 2012 Dean’s Excellence Award for Student Engagement.
What students say about her: A mentor and a lifelong friend, extremely knowledgeable, wants students to succeed, makes students want to do better, provides a safe place to contribute opinions, teaches countless new ways of thinking.
What Stephanie says:
As a child, I loved watching TV commercials. Often I thought I could do better! That was probably my first interaction with marketing. I did a thesis on the role advertising plays in promoting cultures when I was doing my undergraduate studies. Through it I fell in love with marketing, whose impact is beyond what we watch on our screens.
In Shanghai, where I grew up, the teacher who inspired me most was one in my junior high school. Her trust in me boosted my self-confidence and motivated me to spare no effort in achieving the best results. She taught me that unleashing untapped potential takes effort and courage.
I have a strong belief in communication. I connect topics to the needs and interests of an audience. This is one of the essential qualities of a good marketer.
I make a point of remembering students’ names early on. This small but significant effort makes them feel they belong and motivates them to participate more actively.
In today’s dynamic environment the only thing unchanged is change. Consumer needs evolve quickly. The competitive landscape changes constantly. Technology, especially AI, advances and penetrates at an unprecedented speed. Students need to be creative in capturing these changes as they emerge, and respond to them with agility, strategies and ethics.
The way we manage business relationships reflects our values, beliefs and culture. Find the connection between your brand or product and your customers so that what you offer always stays relevant and of interest to them.
I am never shy about sharing my passion for marketing and teaching with students. My teaching philosophy is to inspire and empower, with an aim to support and encourage students to be passionate, brave and independent learners.
A student-centric approach creates an engaging learning environment. I believe it is important to challenge students intellectually and teach them how to ask questions before they learn how to get answers. In doing so, students become engaged learners.
I make a point of remembering students’ names early on. This small but significant effort makes them feel like they belong to the unit and motivates them to participate more actively.
Motivation to learn comes from feeling supported and cared for. Students learn from their teachers, fellow students, industry partners and communities. They learn from success and failure, from challenges, and even frustration and disappointment. We create opportunities for students to learn how to learn.
COVID forced me to redesign students’ learning experiences. New and rich content was added, with a clearer structure, reconfigured to help students with navigation. I used technology to design a blended learning environment combining asynchronous [any communication that does not take place in real-time] pre-recorded mini-lectures, online learning activities and maps, and synchronous activity workshops to ensure students remained fully engaged while being guided and supported.
I share experiences of my own challenges and important moments in my life. I treat students as partners in a mutual learning experience and invest in building trust between us, which has allowed me to inspire and motivate them in the longer term.
Trust is the foundation of all human connections: it is vital to success and societal wellbeing.
Trust is dynamic; it changes over time. Trust is constantly tested, challenged, damaged, even broken. While we want to be trusted by our partners, friends, colleagues, teachers, students and customers, it’s actually more about building trustworthiness in ourselves. The pathway to trustworthiness is kindness, generosity and authenticity.
Students today need to be agile, resilient and creative. They need to be tech-savvy but human-centric. Consumer vulnerability and wellbeing in the digital economy is often overlooked. Despite technology and big data, consumers are not necessarily solving more problems or making better product or brand choices. Many – the aged or socially disadvantaged, for example – do not have the capacity to access and process big data or cope with advanced technology. I am interested in how we humanise technology and create a more inclusive, fair marketplace that supports broader society’s wellbeing.
How would I like my students to remember me? As a great teacher, of course, but also as a teacher who truly cared.
