Abstract
In this April 2015 issue of the Journal of Marketing Education (JME), you will find more ideas for improving marketing education, from as broad as designing an entire course to as specific as changing a single day of class or a classroom policy. Our lead article in this issue concerns teaching sustainability, which is a popular topic in marketing education. As you may recall, our special issue in August 2013 focused on ethics, corporate social responsibility, and sustainability. Rountree and Koernig describe two immersive courses in sustainability that lead to gains in student knowledge and interest in the area. Our second article addresses another area where lack of student understanding has led to lack of student interest—sales. Cummins, Peltier, Pomirleanu, Cross, and Simon find that interactions with sales professionals can build interest in a sales career. Thus, the first two articles show that interactions with professionals working in an area can build student interest in that area. Our next two articles deal with issues that may arise in any course. Neu offers interesting, entertaining, and perhaps troubling insights into how students select team members based on the social cues that potential team members present. Estelami finds evidence of yet another type of bias in student evaluations of teaching. With increasing use of online evaluations, response rates appear to have dropped, and these low response rates create potential for bias. Once again, I am indebted to the Editorial Review Board and many ad hoc reviewers for their time and effort in helping to shape these articles. Their contributions are the foundation of the continued success of JME.
When teaching about sustainability, we face the dual challenge of teaching the content and helping students understand the importance of the topic. Rountree and Koernig describe in detail two courses designed to overcome these challenges. Following Nirenberg’s model for practical organizational behavior education (Nirenberg, 1994), Rountree and Koernig’s designs are immersive and hands-on. They assign in-depth personal visits primarily to nonprofit organizations focused on economic prosperity, environmental quality, or social equity. Students then become involved in creating marketing plans for these organizations, and in the process, they take an active role in defining and observing sustainability marketing concepts in practice. Several important outcomes are noted in the article, including positive comments in reflection assignments. The authors offer an excellent rubric for scoring reflection papers. Rountree and Koernig also report high percentages of students interested in taking more courses on sustainability (93%), and 73% of the students reported an interest in working in the area.
Most marketing faculty know that many of our graduates will find jobs in sales, and most are happy in those positions. However, prior to graduation, many students have a negative attitude about sales jobs and careers. Cummins, Peltier, Pomirleanu, Cross, and Simon analyze several different classroom interventions designed to reduce student misunderstanding about sales and help students develop more positive attitudes about sales. Using the Intent to Pursue a Sales Career Scale developed by this same research team (Peltier, Cummins, Pomirleanu, Cross, and Simon, published in the JME April 2014 issue), the authors found that the most positive reactions to an intervention involved a panel of experienced sales professionals talking to the class. While most of the interventions improved the students’ knowledge of the sales process, the expert panel also substantially improved student perceptions of sales as a profession, perceptions of sales people themselves, and attitudes about ethics in sales. These latter changes in attitudes appeared to substantially affect student intent to pursue a sales career, especially student attitudes about the sales profession itself and how fulfilling the career could be. Thus, it appears that if we focus too much on teaching the mechanics of sales, we inadequately prepare students for sales careers because they need more insight into the career itself. The use of expert panels might also be beneficial for faculty efforts in teaching students about other roles in the marketing profession.
Student teams are ubiquitous in marketing education, and the functioning of teams is a popular topic in JME. In our April 2012 issue, Neu offered interesting insights into student teams using qualitative research, and in this issue, he provides additional insights focusing on how students may use social cues to make inferences about the personalities, work habits, and trustworthiness of potential team members. For example, students who see peers using planners tend to view these peers as reliable. Interestingly, students who pay great attention to make-up, style, or physical fitness tend to be seen as insufficiently focused on academics, while those who pay too little attention to personal hygiene tend to be seen as not caring about themselves or about the quality of a group product. While qualitative research cannot provide accurate estimates of the frequency of such social stereotyping, Neu’s work does raise provocative issues that could be further explored in quantitative research. Of particular concern are stereotypes based on race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, age, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or other variables that may lead to some members of our student communities feeling ostracized. I welcome additional research on these issues in our journal.
Estelami provides an interesting analysis of something we all may have noticed in passing. As student evaluations of teaching move to an online format, response rates have dropped, and may vary substantially across faculty as some teachers do more than others to encourage student response. What are the consequences of these varying response rates? Estelami shows that early responders may differ from late responders in a number of ways, including how they evaluate faculty and their overall evaluations of faculty. This finding implies that low response rates may introduce a systematic bias in response and that varying response rates may lead to advantages and disadvantages for some faculty. This article should motivate some thoughtful faculty discussion about policies surrounding student responses to SET as well as additional research into this response bias.
From specific course activities to entire course designs, and from forming teams to evaluating instruction, the contributors to this issue offer insights and ideas that should be useful to readers. I also hope that they will inspire further research in each area. Until August, thank you for supporting JME.