Homegrown Knowledge: How VCU Faculty Wrote the Marketing Textbook Their Students Needed

by Jodie L. Ferguson, Ph.D.; Jonathan Ross Gilbert, Ph.D.; Katie Gilstrap, M.B.A.; Suzanne C. Makarem, Ph.D.; Mayoor Mohan, Ph.D.; Butch M. Sarma, M.B.A.; and Cesar Zamudio, Ph.D.

A free, open-access marketing textbook rooted in Richmond, VA, serving multiple audiences and covering topics such as consumer behavior, strategy, pricing, promotion, digital marketing, and more.

1464

Students reached in 2025–2026

$131,672

Saved in textbook costs

About the Book

Published in March 2026 through VCU Libraries and made possible by VCU’s Affordable Course Content Awards grant program, Marketing Principles From the River City is designed to serve multiple audiences. It’s an introductory handbook for students encountering marketing for the first time, a refresher for marketing majors stepping into upper-level courses, and a practical reference for marketing practitioners.

The “River City” in the title is Richmond, Virginia, and that geographic grounding is more than a name. Throughout the book, local businesses, brands, and examples bring concepts to life in ways that connect directly to students’ surroundings and everyday experiences.

The book is organized into three overarching sections:

• Marketing and Markets (consumer behavior, B2B behavior, and international marketing)
• The Marketing Toolkit (strategic planning, marketing research, and segmentation/targeting/positioning)
• The Marketing Mix (product, distribution, pricing, promotion, personal selling, and digital marketing)

The book is currently available for free in digital, PDF, EPUB, and print formats.

Pedagogical innovation and student impact

A defining feature of this OER is its use of local Richmond businesses, retailers, and brands to anchor abstract marketing concepts in students’ everyday surroundings. Rather than relying on nationally or globally focused examples, the authors built a textbook that meets VCU students where they live.

Adopted for all sections of MKTG 301 (Marketing Principles), the book replaced a costly Pearson textbook previously required for the course. In its first year alone, it saved enrolled students over $131,000 in course material costs.

Student quotes:

Industry recognition and impact

The project was recognized beyond the VCU campus at a national level. It was named a finalist in the Teaching Innovation Competition at the 2025 Society for Marketing Advances conference—a major professional organization for marketing faculty, not exclusively focused on open education work.

By presenting at a mainstream marketing conference, the authors helped spread awareness of open education practices to faculty who may not otherwise have encountered them, extending the project’s impact far beyond VCU’s classrooms.

The conference presentation drew enthusiastic responses and substantive dialogue among marketing faculty from Virginia and beyond, generating momentum for the open education movement within the discipline.

Scalability & future potential

Interest in adopting the book has already spread to other institutions. Faculty from other universities who attended the conference presentation expressed interest in using it for their own courses, and suggested a compelling model for expansion:

• The book could evolve into a living document used by multiple universities, with VCU serving as a kind of editorial board.
• Other institutions could customize their own versions, swapping in local business examples, institutional colors, and regional context to make the textbook feel native to their students.
• The CC BY-NC license supports this kind of collaborative, adaptable use across the higher education community.

Authors are actively exploring these possibilities, with the book potentially becoming a model for how discipline-specific OER can be both locally meaningful and broadly reusable.

The lead photo is an image of the homepage of the textbook. Ilustration credit to Zofia Farley