Northstar Creative

The Brief

A course about self-marketing, taught the least memorable way possible.

MAR4354 — "Marketing Yourself in the Global Marketplace" — is a professional-development course. Résumés, cover letters, LinkedIn, personal branding, interview etiquette. Genuinely useful material, and material that has a way of going in one ear and out the other, because it's usually delivered as a checklist of tasks a student completes to get a grade and then forgets by graduation.

Dr. Otis Kopp came to my team wanting to break that pattern — an overhaul that would engage students in a way the standard version never could. And this course had a quality I found irresistible from the first conversation: its subject is the thing I do. It's content strategy, pointed at a person. Teaching someone to market themselves is teaching them positioning, voice, audience, and narrative. The course was practically asking to be designed by someone who thinks that way.

So the question wrote itself. If this class is about learning to market yourself — why would we have students practice on a fake product? Why not make them the product?

The Design

Welcome to Northstar Creative.

Students don't enroll in a course. They start an internship. On day one they're the newest cohort of brand-strategy interns at Northstar Creative, a fictional agency in the heart of Miami — a city that happens to be home for these students, which quietly makes the fiction feel less like a set and more like a place. Dr. Kopp isn't the professor. He's the Founder and CEO.

Then, in Week 1, the students' first task is to read a memo from the CEO. It's the literal on-ramp into the course — and it's where the premise turns:

That single move rewires the whole course. The students stop being brand strategists working on someone else's account and become the account. Everything they build from here is, in the fiction, evidence that Northstar's incubator can turn raw talent into a market-ready professional — and in reality, it's the exact coursework MAR4354 already required. The story didn't add work. It gave the existing work a reason to matter.

The final is the payoff of the premise. Each pod takes its members' work and merges it into a single ideal candidate — then pitches that candidate to the Future-Makers as proof the incubator delivers. It's a final exam that only makes sense because of the story, and it assesses exactly what the course was always meant to assess.

The modality

Using "hybrid" as a feature, not a compromise.

Unlike a fully online course, this one meets in person once a week — and that changes the design in two ways worth separating honestly, because one is a controlled certainty and the other is a live experiment.

The certainty is the feedback loop. In a fully online course, our earliest structured read on whether a design is landing comes from the mid-semester survey, four or five weeks in — and this is a six-week accelerated summer course, so by then it's nearly over. A survey can't rescue a term that short. But Dr. Kopp is in a room with these students every single week. That's a dramatically shorter loop: if something isn't working, we hear about it in days, not weeks, and can adjust while it still matters. We're treating that cadence as one of the course's real advantages and building the plan to exploit it.

The experiment is the frame itself. By design, the in-person sessions are meant to hold the fiction: Dr. Kopp briefs the cohort as the CEO, stays in character, and assigns work as Northstar rather than as a professor, with students responding in-role. My hypothesis is that sustaining the frame into the physical classroom deepens retention rather than cheapening it — that being treated like a professional is a more durable teacher than being told to act like one. Whether a live cohort sustains that immersion week over week is genuinely unproven, and it's the open question this course is built to answer. It's the kind of bet you can only settle by running it.

Where it stands

Launched last week — so the first verdict is the client's.

The course went live this past week, which means there's no student outcome data yet, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. What I can point to is the reaction of the person whose vision was on the line — and it arrived in two stages that, together, tell the story I care about most.

First, when we delivered the storyboard:

Then, after going through the finished course:

That second quote is the one I'd frame on a wall. A subject-matter expert came in with a vision, and left preferring the version we built over the one he originally pitched. That's not a designer executing a spec — that's a designer earning enough trust to evolve the vision past where the client could take it alone. The student results are still ahead of us. This part already happened.

Why it works

The design decisions, and the theory under them.

The core bet is grounded in narrative transportation and situated identity: people internalize a skill faster when they rehearse the identity that owns it, inside a world with real stakes, than when they complete tasks labeled with that skill's name. A student who has spent a semester being a professional — pitched, briefed, held to a standard — walks out carrying a self-concept the checklist version never builds. The intern-to-product pivot is constructivism doing double duty: the artifacts students build aren't fictional exercises, they're a genuinely usable résumé, brand voice guide, and LinkedIn presence. They construct a real professional identity and the story's proof at the same time.

And then there's the alignment I'm proudest of. This is a course about marketing, designed using the actual craft of marketing — audience insight, positioning, a brand world, a narrative arc, a channel strategy. The design isn't a metaphor for the subject. It's a working demonstration of it. The students are learning to market themselves inside a thing that is, itself, a piece of marketing.

The bigger idea

This one barely needs translating.

Most of my instructional-design work maps onto content strategy. This one basically is content strategy — I just happened to deploy it inside a university. Building Northstar meant doing everything a content strategist does on a brand launch: establishing a world (a Miami agency with a name, a founder, a mission), casting the audience as the protagonist (interns who become the pitch), aligning every asset to a single narrative spine, and choosing how the story lives across channels — online shell plus a weekly in-person touchpoint — with a feedback cadence built to iterate fast.

The intern-to-product pivot is, underneath the fiction, the oldest insight in good marketing: the most persuasive campaign doesn't push a product at an audience — it makes the audience the hero and lets the product be how they win. Northstar just applied that to the students themselves, in a class about exactly that.

If you want to know whether I can think like a content strategist, this is the artifact I'd point to first. It's the one where the instructional designer and the strategist were never two different people.