D375 is MKTG 5030 Marketing Communications and Storytelling, a graduate School of Business course worth 3 competency units. The catalog frames it as integrative marketing communications with an emphasis on storytelling and creativity. The word doing the most work is integrative: this course is about making every channel say a compatible thing to the same person, and the storytelling element is the technique that makes the compatible thing memorable rather than merely consistent.
Integration first, story second
Students who love the creative half of this course tend to write a campaign idea and attach a plan to it. The scored logic runs the other way. Integration means one strategic message expressed differently across channels according to what each channel is good at, with the sequence and repetition thought through. The story is how that message becomes something a person will hold onto.
A practical way to keep the order right is to write the single message down as one sentence before any creative work begins, then check every proposed execution against it. If a proposed piece of content cannot be traced back to that sentence, it belongs to a different campaign, however good it is. Evaluators can see that traceability, and its absence is the classic weakness in a campaign paper that reads well.
Storytelling itself needs to be treated as a technique with parts rather than as a mood. A usable story has a protagonist the audience recognises, a problem with stakes, a change that happens, and a role for the brand that is honest about its size. Most brand stories fail because the brand casts itself as the hero when the customer should be, and naming that choice explicitly in your paper is a graduate level observation.
WGU records the outcome as Competent or Not Competent, with no letter grades and no ordinary grade point average, and performance assessment work can be revised and resubmitted with no penalty attached to the result. Commit to a message and a story, and let the evaluation tell you where the reasoning behind them needs to be more visible.
Turning scored aspects into a communications plan
If your course is assessed by a performance assessment, the aspects your evaluator scores are the plan's sections, each needing a score of 2 in its own right. Communications deliverables often carry creative artefacts, sample messages, a storyboard, a channel matrix, and creative work is where writers spend time they should be spending on justification.
Here is the budget arithmetic when creative work is included. Suppose the rubric shows nine scored aspects and the prompt asks for a plan of about 2,700 words including two sample executions. Allow 300 words for the executions and the paragraphs explaining what each demonstrates, 250 for the situation and audience, and 100 for a close, leaving 2,050 across nine aspects, or about 228 words each.
Then apply a rule specific to this subject: any aspect containing the word justify, evaluate or explain gets its allocation before any aspect containing the word create. Creative aspects are usually satisfied by the artefact plus a short rationale, while justification aspects need argument, and argument is what runs short when a deadline arrives. Front loading the reasoning is what keeps a creative paper from being returned for being merely attractive.
A structure for a communications and storytelling deliverable
The dominant genre is an integrated campaign plan for a described brand. The order below keeps strategy ahead of execution, which is the order the aspects are usually written in.
| Section | What it fixes in place | Output | Where campaigns go wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Communications objective | What has to change in someone's head or behaviour | A measurable objective with a timeframe | An objective that is really a sales target |
| Audience | Who is being addressed and what they currently believe | Audience definition with current belief stated | Demographics with no belief to shift |
| Single message | The one thing everything must communicate | One sentence | Three messages, which means none |
| Story | The narrative that carries the message | Protagonist, problem, change, brand role | The brand as hero, the customer as audience |
| Channel plan | Which channels, doing which job, in what order | Channel matrix with role per channel | Every channel carrying the same asset |
| Executions | What the work actually looks like | Samples tied to channels | Creative that contradicts the single message |
| Budget and schedule | What it costs and when it runs | Allocation table with flighting | No budget, so no trade off is visible |
| Measurement | How the objective will be tested | Metrics with baselines and a review point | Impressions standing in for belief change |
Evidence craft when the deliverable is creative
Creative work invites the response that it is subjective, and graduate assessment does not accept that. Every creative choice in a strong paper has a reason that is not personal taste.
Three families supply those reasons. Communication and persuasion research gives you evidence on source credibility, message framing, emotional versus rational appeals, repetition and narrative transportation, which is the academic term for what happens when a story absorbs someone. Cite it for any claim about why an approach will work. Audience data, from government statistics, industry media research or the brand's own published information, tells you what the audience consumes and when, which is what makes a channel choice defensible. Category evidence, meaning what competitors are currently doing, tells you what your work has to be different from, and it is observable at no cost.
One more habit that lifts these papers: quantify the plan even roughly. A channel matrix with estimated cost and estimated reach per channel turns a creative document into a marketing document. The numbers can be published ranges cited with their dates. What matters is that trade offs become visible, because a plan where nothing was traded off is a plan that never made a decision.
What earns Competent, and what comes back
Passing plans are traceable from objective to execution. One message, one story, channels with distinct jobs, executions that obviously belong to the same campaign, and a measurement approach that would actually detect the belief or behaviour change the objective named.
Returns cluster in four places. Multiple messages, which produces a campaign that feels scattered even when each piece is good. Creative work with no rationale, which leaves the justification aspects empty. A channel list where every channel does the same job, so integration was never demonstrated. And measurement written as media metrics with no link to the communications objective, which is the most common single miss in this subject.
Sequencing is the most underused idea available to you here. Channels do not only differ in what they can carry, they differ in when they work. Broad reach media create the recognition that makes a later, more specific message land. Search and comparison content catch someone already looking. Direct channels such as email do their best work on people who already have a relationship. A plan that states which channel runs first, which builds on it and which converts is demonstrating integration in the strongest available way, and the argument takes two or three sentences.
The other place to earn marks cheaply is the current belief statement. Communications objectives are always about moving someone from one belief or behaviour to another, and a paper that never says what the audience currently thinks has no starting point to move from. Write it plainly: this audience currently believes the category is all the same, or currently associates the brand with a product it stopped selling years ago. Once that sentence exists, the single message almost writes itself, because the message is whatever has to be true instead.
Five mistakes that cost time in D375
Writing the creative first. Strategy that arrives after the idea always looks retrofitted, because it is.
Confusing a slogan with a message. The message is the belief you want to install. The slogan is one way to express it.
Casting the brand as the hero. Stories work when the audience sees themselves in the protagonist and the brand plays a supporting part.
Channels with identical roles. Integration means each channel doing what it does best, sequenced, not the same asset resized.
No budget anywhere. Without cost there is no trade off, and without a trade off the plan has made no decisions to evaluate.
What we do here, and what we will not do
We work on the written deliverable: mapping the rubric, budgeting aspects so justification is funded before creative, drafting a model campaign plan with sample executions you can study and rewrite in your own voice, and reading a returned evaluation to name the edits that will clear it. We do not place media, publish content or run anything on your behalf. If D375 carries an objective assessment on your plan, that exam is proctored and our role is preparation only. We are never present during an assessment, never take one for a student, and never ask for or handle WGU portal credentials.
Building the campaign for D375?
Send the brief, the task instructions and the rubric. We come back with the single message, the story structure and a straight read on whether your channels have distinct jobs.
Three questions students ask about D375
Do I need design skills to produce the creative samples?
What makes marketing communications integrated rather than just multi channel?
How do I measure something as soft as a story?
Where D375 sits in WGU's programs
The July 2026 catalog places this code in 2 current WGU programs. Open a program page for the complete standard path and term positions. The live Degree Plan remains authoritative after transfer credit, substitutions, and mentor planning.
The assessments, one by one
The public catalog does not publish this course's PA/OA identity or task count. WGU Tutors publishes at most one PA manual per course and only from a WGU-controlled public rubric. Until that source exists, PA help begins from the student's real Course of Study and OA support remains preparation only.