Journal of Marketing Education

This article analyzes the extent to which Australian and New Zealand marketing educators use dedicated or stand-alone courses to equip students with alternative views of business. A census of marketing programs in degree-granting universities was conducted. Program brochures were obtained via the Internet and were content analyzed. This study reports a lower proportion of universities requiring students to take a course dedicated to society and environmental issues than previous studies have. Only 27% of universities in Australia required students to take a dedicated ethics, social responsibility, and/or sustainability course. Only 8% of universities offered a dedicated core marketing ethical or social responsibility course. Previous sample estimates may have overstated ethical, social responsibility, and sustainability course requirements. There is considerable room for improvement in Australia and New Zealand if universities are to equip their students with the skills, knowledge, and ideas to benefit themselves, the organizations they choose to work for, and society as a whole.

Marketing education today is facing significant challenges in attracting and retaining high-quality students. The focus of this article is to advocate engaging 1st-year students in the practice of marketing to help develop their identity as a marketing major, to see the relevance of their studies, and to enhance their thinking and self-regulating learning skills. Action Learning is offered as a pedagogy capable of transforming the initial introduction to marketing experience into a highly motivating and engaging course. An innovative Marketing 101 course is described in which freshman undertake multiple cycles of analyzing, planning, implementing, and controlling marketing strategies in an on-campus coffee house.

An unconditioned stimulus in the form of “participation money” serves to keep track of students’ comments during class discussions and extrinsically to reinforce their class participation behaviors. Using a longitudinal experiment to investigate the effect of the participation money stimulus on several education outcomes, the author finds that the stimulus increases the number of comments during weekly class discussions, as perceived by both instructors and students. This increased class participation has a positive effect on students’ experience and perceived understanding of course material, as well as the social atmosphere during class discussions. The findings thus have important implications for marketing educators.

In today’s business world, the ability to work efficiently and effectively in a team is mandatory to a business student’s success. Many employers rank “ability to work with a group” as one of the most important attributes for hiring business school graduates. Although an abundance of research has investigated group processes and dynamics during student group projects, no studies to date have specifically examined how instructors perceive the way in which students operate within their groups. The primary goal of this research is to address how student views regarding group work compare to those of their instructors. The results indicate that there are significant gaps between students’ opinions of their team experiences and the perceptions of the faculty who assign the group activities. The findings have implications for the use of team projects and the attitudes and behaviors instructors have regarding the efficacy of student groups.

The major challenge of marketing education is that the discipline continually reinvents itself. Marketing approaches and practices once new rapidly become old and many texts grow outdated in a short period of time, increasing the pressure on the instructors to provide the students with the latest knowledge. The changing environment of business necessitates the integration of innovative tools into the curriculum to enhance experiential learning and develop soft skills. This article presents the adaptation of blogging as an innovative approach for building and improving necessary marketing skills. This approach requires the students to maintain blogs where, as part of the Marketing Management course, they can write about “anything marketing,” such as recent campaigns, commercials, new products, or their own marketing-related experiences to provide an experiential exercise in marketing and produce significant improvements in students’ soft skills. This article offers a detailed discussion of such outcomes based on qualitative and quantitative evidence.

This article provides a justification and an implementation plan for the establishment of a historical orientation across the undergraduate marketing curriculum. The justification for the historical perspective addresses three areas: tapping into the extensive body of knowledge in marketing history, practical implications, and critical thinking. The implementation plan involves recommendations drawing on two pedagogical approaches: (a) the degree to which topical marketing history can be infused into the marketing curriculum and (b) the development of a general historical perspective across marketing topics and courses (i.e., the role of marketing in history) by specifying historical contexts that are relevant to particular courses. General information on historical research methods in marketing is offered, and an example of a historical case analysis that illustrates a potential way to generate concrete practical outcomes from the historical context of marketing is included. Results of a survey of students show favorable responses to the discussion of the historical context of marketing in a senior-level marketing course.

The purpose of this study is to offer a comprehensive assessment of journal standings in Marketing from two perspectives. The discipline perspective of rankings is obtained from a collection of published journal ranking studies during the past 15 years. The studies in the published ranking stream are assessed for reliability by examining internal correlations within the set. Aggregate rankings are presented from the published ranking stream, as well as from the two predominant ranking approaches used in these studies (opinion surveys and citation analyses). A new data source for journal rankings is introduced—the actual in-house target journal lists used by a sample of Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB)-accredited schools to evaluate faculty research, representing an institutional perspective. The aggregate journal rankings from these lists are presented, as well as the rankings in two subsegments of the sample (US/non-US and doctoral/nondoctoral). The publications from the discipline perspective are compared to data from the in-house target journal lists actually used by AACSB-accredited schools. A full set of rankings across both data sets (school lists and the published article stream) is presented and differences are discussed.

The incorporation of personal response system (PRS) clickers into teaching pedagogy has created implications for teaching practice and student satisfaction. Using a current undergraduate business student population, the authors measure student attitudes and preferences and identify student performance outcomes relating to the use of PRS clickers. Study results validate the broad applicability of this technology by showing positive student attitudes, learning experiences, and the mitigation of barriers toward acceptance of this technology. Importantly, measures of student performance correlate to self-reported learning outcomes realized through using PRS clickers. The study also finds evidence that PRS clickers benefit those students who are frequently disadvantaged in the classroom. Specifically, students with a low need for cognition or facing cultural barriers are shown to have a better learning experience when using clicker technology. The article concludes with recommendations on applying PRS clicker technology to teaching practice and identifies areas for future investigation.

In academia, interdependence or shared responsibility between instructor and student is an essential part of the educational process, yet research examining its effect on student responses toward their learning experience is scant. To offer insight into this context, two studies are developed. Study 1 finds that perceptions of shared responsibility for student learning are positively related to attitudinal, emotional, and behavioral responses toward the marketing education experience. Study 2 finds that shared responsibility relates positively to grade earned in the course. Implications for marketing academicians are discussed.