Abstract
Recently, I had the privilege of being on the panel Overcoming Challenges in Marketing in a Disrupted Marketplace with Russell Belk and Roland Rust at the FORE International Marketing Conference, FORE School of Management, New Delhi, India. The titles of our talks are rather self-explanatory: “The Death of Marketing and Its Possible Reincarnation” by Professor Russell W. Belk, “Artificial Intelligence: Negotiating Marketing Challenges in the Disrupted World” by Professor Roland Rust,” and “The Transdisciplinary Future of Marketing Education: Teaching and Learning Disrupted” by Professor Victoria Crittenden. All three of us have written on our respective topics, but we had not ever brought our thoughts into one forum.
While my thoughts shared at the conference sprang from the thinking that Bob Peterson and I conveyed in two editorials for the Journal of Marketing Education in 2019 (Crittenden & Peterson, 2019a, 2019b), listening to Professors Belk and Rust called to mind an external curriculum review that I have been conducting over the past few months. Via our marketing curriculum, we profess to be preparing our marketing students to be career-ready by providing them with the proper skillset for thinking and acting both strategically and tactically. As stated in Crittenden and Peterson (2019a, p. 3): We are educating our students in an era of digital disruption. The changes in traditional roles of consumers and companies brought on by digital disruption have created the need for educational material that can shape and contribute to the emerging and evolving world of marketing.
However, perhaps we are overly optimistic in thinking that we, as educators, can shape and contribute, because maybe we really need to focus ourselves on catching up with what is going on in marketing.
In terms of catching up, Belk (2020) describes the two fatal blows to marketing as we have known it as (a) distributed brand ownership via a shifting of brand control from the marketer to the consumer and (b) big data, and he discussed both in his talk at the FORE conference. Essentially, both fatal blows to marketing are products of the internet and its affordances. In his thinking about what it will take to have a resurrection of marketing, Belk (2020, pp. 170–171) says, I think we marketing academics need to substantially change our curricula as well. Marketing textbooks have not caught up with these changes in marketing and consumption&we need to learn and then teach how to create radical innovation&we should take what we learn as well as what puzzles us into the classroom. Before we can reanimate marketing, we need to reanimate ourselves.
Reanimating ourselves sounds like a reach goal for many of us in marketing education. But, in looking at my slides for the FORE conference, I realized I was also suggesting a reanimation—albeit not as eloquently. That is, one of my slides was titled “Teaching & Learning Disrupted” and my three bullet points were as follows: (a) be aware of what marketing practitioners want in terms of marketing graduates they hire, (b) be aware of what technologies are likely to lead to digital disruption, and (c) be sufficiently knowledgeable about digital technologies so as to effectively and efficiently educate students.
When I listened to Professor Rust’s talk at the FORE conference and then read The Feeling Economy by Rust and Huang (2021), my catch-up thinking about marketing education became circular. According to Rust and Huang (2021), our current educational system is in tune with a thinking economy and the thinking economy is based on a skillset that can be overtaken by artificial intelligence (AI). Thus, the technology for which marketing educators should be playing catch up is also leading to a necessary change in education because AI will be doing the thinking and workers will need to be doing the feeling. With this, Rust and Huang (2021, p. 97) tell us that “the emphasis of education needs to move toward the softer people skills&empathy, emotional intelligence, communication, interpersonal relationships, and coaching and leadership.”
On the one hand, I am wondering if we as marketing educators are really far behind because we still need to master elements of the thinking economy and convey those technological tools to our students (e.g., I feel pretty confident in saying that AI is not a big part of the marketing curriculum). On the other hand, we are moving into the feeling economy; thus, we need to emphasize the soft skills in our teaching and learning (but, perceptually, that might make the marketing curriculum appear less rigorous than other functional curricula—something many of us have heard for decades).
For the external marketing curriculum review that I mentioned earlier, I conducted some very unscientific research. That is, I reached out to marketing colleagues via addresses in my email directory (nothing random, only a quick look to ensure the address was for a marketing colleague whom I thought might respond to my query) and asked for the names of the top two or three courses/subjects they thought were important for our marketing students. Not surprisingly to many of us, the top two courses/subjects were digital marketing and marketing analytics—basically the trends that have dealt a fatal blow to marketing according to Belk’s (2020) demise of marketing. Marketing research, consumer behavior, and sales comprised the remainder of the top five courses/subjects that a fairly large group of marketing faculty see as important for our students. As I look at this list of five, I have to wonder if we as marketing educators are focused currently on the thinking economy because that is where our students will be placed upon graduation at this time. To that end, I agree that marketing educators are playing catch up. For example, Langan et al. (2019) reported that only 4.6% of marketing degree programs in their sample required a marketing analytics course and only 4% required a digital marketing course.
However, marketing research, consumer behavior, and sales have long been staples in our marketing curriculum. Interestingly, these three courses are likely the ones that have a sharp focus on the soft skills referred to by Rust and Huang (2021). Marketing research and consumer behavior are, by default, focused on the intimacies and intricacies of gaining insight to the psychology of consumer decision making. A sales course also gets into the weeds in terms of building relationships with potential customers and maintaining those relationships over time.
When pondering these course topics within the context of needing to catch up in the thinking economy and also be prepared for the feeling economy, my brain made a leap to the wheel of retailing (McNair, 1958). We have what I will refer to as the staple courses—marketing research, consumer behavior, and sales—that have enabled educators to focus on the softer skill sets (as per the feeling economy needs) advancing our students’ knowledge of, and engagement with, buyer behavior. Yet, we have the new entrants to our curriculum—digital and marketing analytics—that ensure our students are ready to play in the thinking economy sandbox, where students and the courses they took are vulnerable to the rapidity of technological change. Thus, the marketing education wheel goes round and round.
Hollander (1960) crafted tentative explanations of the wheel of retailing, and I think it would be a great scholarly challenge to explore possible explanations or forces for our own wheel of marketing education in the context of the thinking and feeling economies. Belk (2020) notes that our traditional marketing functions are not going away anytime soon. However, we will see shifts in those functions. Critically, can we begin to capture the forces of this wheel of marketing education so that we, as educators, are not constantly playing catch up?
Unfortunately, it is not quite clear in my head how the demise of marketing, the thinking economy, the feeling economy, or the wheel of marketing education segue to the articles appearing in this issue. However, I suspect the article topics could ultimately be categorized into tentative explanations of the wheel, just as that done by Hollander (1960) with his attempt to determine if there was a natural process or patterns of retail development. I am not going to take that huge leap here, as I have likely pushed the boundaries of the art and science of marketing with my thoughts to this point. But, we do have an interesting and a strong line-up of articles and authors in this issue.
As the Wheel Turns
While we may not understand the exact forces that turn the wheel of marketing education, we have many educational scholars shedding light on the phenomenon. In the first article for 2022, “What Works Best: A Systematic Review of Actual Learning in Marketing and Management Education Research,” Bacon and Stewart focused on actual learning and conducted a systematic literature review that encompassed over 4,000 articles published in 5 marketing and management journals. Through their research, they found that targeted engagement of content and skills linked to learning outcomes of the course was important for actual learning. If you are interested in student teams, case teaching, different modes of instruction, student response systems, class size, and/or simulations and games, this paper will definitely warrant your attention.
Continuing with student engagement, Gnusowski and Schoefer in their article “Student-to-Student Interactions in Marketing Education: A Critical Incident Technique-Based Inquiry into Drivers of Students’ (Dis)Satisfaction” examined student interactions in group work and the impact on student satisfaction. The research provides valuable insight in terms of student desires for their classroom experiences. The topic of groups is continued with the article “Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way: Synthesizing Creativity, Contagious Motivation, and Unique Projects into the Course Experience” by Krishen. Utilizing the input-process-output model, Krishen explores the course project as a contextual queue for learning, the professor as a transformational leader, and the classroom as an experiential learning community.
The next two articles offer a twist on student engagement by examining exogenous variables impacting student engagement. In their article, “Evaluating E-Book Effectiveness and the Impact on Student Engagement,” Merkle, Ferrell, Ferrell, and Hair examine student engagement by looking at student perceptions of the effectiveness of e-books. Although there were some mixed results in terms of e-book impact, the findings provide food-for-thought with respect to the digital disruption of textbooks. In “Growing the Talent Pool: How Sponsorship of Professional Sales Programs Enhances Employer Branding,” Groza, Zmich, and Groza describe how classroom engagement via co-teaching is found to have a positive impact on student perceptions. This positive relationship is especially critical for lesser-known firms.
The remaining articles in this issue transition from student engagement to structural aspects of our teaching and learning. A team of 17 marketing educational scholars from Western Michigan University explored student perceptions about the marketing major. In “Considering a Marketing Degree? Student Perceptions of General versus Specialized Majors” Atkin, Bowie, Cowley, Eckert, Ferrin, Harrison, Lancendorfer, Luqmani, Luqmani, Leingpibul, Mumuni, O’Reilly, Quraeshi, Samples, Veeck, Xie, and Zondag use social cognitive theory to understand how students make selections when offered choices within the major. Another structural issue is examined by Mourey, Markley, and Koernig in “Dazzling Descriptions and Tantalizing Titles: Simple versus Complex Course Information influences Course Selection.” In this article, readers get a peek into the power of course titles and course descriptions. As the authors found, the path to purchase does affect intention as well as expectations about the course itself. Just as student/course evaluations tend to wrap up our semester of teaching, “How Faculty Status impacts Student Evaluations of Teaching: A Study of Full- versus Part-Time Marketing Faculty” wraps up this first issue of 2022. Tashchian, Hedden, and Forrester share their findings in terms of students’ perceptions of instructor knowledge, pedagogical skill, rigor, and grading as related to a faculty member’s employment status.
Looking ahead, the special issue on entrepreneurial marketing invites submissions focusing on all forms of ventures. The special issue co-editors, Shari Worthington and Fabian Eggers, are excited to receive contributions that include a variety of educational opportunities—from our traditional undergraduate and graduate student bodies to entrepreneurs, small business owners, and managers. This will be the journal’s first special issue for entrepreneurial marketing educators and, given the importance of entrepreneurial marketing in today’s economy, it is a timely issue.
As evidenced in the research published in the Journal of Marketing Education, we are continuing to turn the wheel of marketing education. That wheel turning is occurring in terms of both structure and skills. Structurally, for example, our educational scholarship is contributing to a better understanding of the courses that enable our students for both the thinking and feeling economies. Skill-wise, scholars publishing in the Journal are focused on contributing to skill development and enhancement that make all of us better prepared for the thinking economy.