Best Paper Winners: Journal of Marketing Education

This month, the Journal of Marketing Education recognized its Outstanding Article of the Year winners for 2012. Congratulations to Bruce K. Pilling, Edward E. Rigdon, &  Harvey J. Brightman, all of Georgia State University, who published the award-winning paper, “Building a Metrics-Enabled Marketing Curriculum: The Cornerstone Course” in the journal’s August 2012 issue. The journal also recognized the Outstanding Reviewer of the Year, 2012: Michelle Steward of Wake Forest University. You can see past winners of the Outstanding Article award by clicking here. Our congratulations to all!

The Journal of Marketing Education provides a forum for the exchange of ideas, information, and experiences related to educating students of marketing and advertising. Click here to learn more or submit a paper to the journal.

Top Five: Journal of Macromarketing

Macromarketing Society

What is a marketing ideology, and what is the marketer’s role in contemporary culture? These and more are among the questions explored in the current top-read articles from the Journal of Macromarketing, which examines important social issues, how they are affected by marketing, and how society influences the conduct of marketing. These articles are freely available to access using the links below through May 9:

Sidney J. Levy and Marius K. Luedicke
From Marketing Ideology to Branding Ideology
March 2013

A. Fuat Fırat
Marketing: Culture Institutionalized
March 2013

Robert V. Kozinets, Andrea Hemetsberger, and Hope Jensen Schau
The Wisdom of Consumer Crowds: Collective Innovation in the Age of Networked Marketing
December 2008

Erik Assadourian
Transforming Cultures: From Consumerism to Sustainability
June 2010

John Thøgersen
Country Differences in Sustainable Consumption: The Case of Organic Food
June 2010

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Why Embrace Quantitative Methods?

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Editor’s note: We’re pleased to welcome Crina O. Tarasi, J. Holton Wilson, Cheenu Puri, and Richard L. Divine, all of Central Michigan University, who published “Affinity for Quantitative Tools: Undergraduate Marketing Students Moving Beyond Quantitative Anxiety” in the Journal of Marketing Education.

While teaching a variety of marketing courses, from the introductory course to advanced courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, we have observed interesting (and disturbing) attitudes about quantitative analysis among marketing students. In brief, they just seem not to like working with the quantitative aspects of marketing. It may be that marketing students select this major because they see marketing as a qualitative area of study and work. However, in an increasingly data driven world it is important for marketing professionals to appreciate and be able to work with a variety of quantitative forms of analysis to gain information from the wealth of data that are available.

In a way the results of our research have been confirmatory. Survey results do tell us that marketing students have less affinity for quantitative methods than do non-marketing majors and that women students have less affinity than do males. On a positive note we find that we can affect quantitative affinity in our classes as evidenced by the result that those students who have taken a marketing research class have stronger quantitative affinity than students who have not taken marketing research. As a result of our findings we may be able to better understand marketing students’ lack of quantitative affinity thus enabling us to better help them appreciate the role of quantitative analyses in their course work and careers.

Probably the most surprising finding was the insignificant relationship between internship experience and quantitative affinity. We thought students who had some professional experience in the workplace would develop a greater appreciation for the value and importance of quantitative methods. Not only was this relationship insignificant, but the observed sample means were opposite of the direction hypothesized. Maybe due to the less technical assignments they receive as interns, most students are not exposed to quantitatively based decision making.  We were saddened to find confirmation in the data that marketing majors enjoy less the quantitative aspects of their job than their peers in other majors and that the female students are less confident than their male peers.

The research we have published leads to several further research streams. First it would be interesting to know how a student’s quantitative attitude affects the decision about what major is selected. Second, we would like to understand what/who influence the formation of marketing students’ attitudes about quantitative methods. Is it prior educational experiences in college? Is it pre-college educational experiences? Is it parents? Is it fellow students? Third, it would be interesting to know how the attitudes change once a student has, perhaps five years, work experience. Along this line we would like to investigate whether the career path within marketing makes a difference. Fourth, it could be useful to use the instrument that we developed to evaluate how what we do in courses influences students’ quantitative attitudes. The instrument could be administered both at the start and end of particular courses: perhaps the intro course, the marketing research course, and the capstone course. It may also be possible to use the instrument to evaluate various interventions that we develop in an attempt to improve quantitative affinity.

Multicultural Sensitivity for Marketing Students

Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome Dr. Mark S. Rosenbaum, Kohl’s Professor of Retail Marketing at Northern Illinois University. Dr. Rosenbaum provided this commentary on his paper, “A Multicultural Service Sensitivity Exercise for Marketing Students,” co-authored by Ioana Moraru of Northern Illinois University and Dr. Lauren I. Labrecque of Loyola University Chicago and published on October 4, 2012 in the Journal of Marketing Education.

Marketing educators place service quality at the heart of the curriculum, painting service providers as defenders of their customers’ welfare and thwarters of service failures. In reality, this rosy imagery is not always true. Oftentimes other customers negatively impact the service encounter and service providers themselves can also act as discriminatory agents toward their own customers. In “A Multicultural Service Sensitivity Exercise for Marketing Students,” which appears in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Marketing Education, we discuss the importance of engaging students with the discussion of service discrimination and describe an in-class exercise to help educators prepare students to face this reality.

What inspired you to be interested in this topic?

The topic was inspired from years of practical experience prior to academia, working in one of Chicago’s largest shoes stores and Saks Fifth Avenue and my own experience of retail discrimination while shopping with my partner. In 2007 I published an article in the Journal of Business Research that really brought to light the fact that other customers often conduct discriminatory acts towards other shoppers, and employees also engage in this behavior unbeknown to the human resources department. I’ve also experienced discrimination firsthand as a Caucasian living in Honolulu. This discrimination was often performed by Japanese front-front employees who used racial profiling to determine what level of services to offer. In fact, many of my Caucasian friends would plan shopping trips in Las Vegas or Waikiki in order to avoid discrimination.

Over the six years that I’ve been teaching services marketing and retail, I’ve realized that these topics are not covered in-depth in any of the textbooks and that students weren’t being exposed to these realities. We tell students that service employees should be customer champions, when in fact this isn’t reality. The most interesting and powerful things about this exercise are that students openly admit to knowing and experiencing discrimination. In essence, this exercise exposes the elephant in the room.

Were there findings that were surprising to you?

The most surprising finding for me was the level of openness of the students and how willing we are to accept these discriminatory practices. For many, the topic is nothing new. They know this exists and think of it as “normal”; however, the key difference here is that although most are aware of it none have really ever talked openly about it and thought about the impact that it has on others. For example, when discussing how groups of young African-American males are followed by employees to watch out for shoplifting, or how obese people are treated with difference service standards, there is nearly a unanimous class acceptance that this is “normal.” It’s as if we tell ourselves this is okay to understand why employees would alter their service quality. Perhaps discrimination is part of our biological narrative. Meaning, maybe it’s inherent in our DNA. It’s the managers’ role to unravel our DNA, break this tendency, and stop the discriminatory actions towards marginalized or stigmatized status.

How do you see this study influencing future research and/or practice?

This exercise is a dosage of practical reality for any classroom and is aligned with the AACSB initiatives for including diversity in the classroom. Students often remark that this is the one thing that really sticks with them from class. I’ll never forgot an MBA student leaving my class in tears after she came to the realization that she was responsible for encouraging her staff to engage in discriminatory behavior.

It’s essential that we come to the realization that service employees are not always the champions of service quality. And unfortunately, in an economic situation that is constraining training budgets, it is even more important for educators to ensure that future managers are exposed to diversity and multicultural issues. My hope is that this topic will be discussed in-depth in future editions of services marketing and retailing textbooks.

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Click here to read the article in the OnlineFirst section of the Journal of Marketing Education. Follow this link to learn more about the journal and this one to receive e-alerts about new research covering the ideas, information, and experiences related to educating students of marketing and advertising.

Why Do We Buy?

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Whether they’re aware of it or not, consumers in a retail environment make decisions that are influenced by everything from adequate aisle size, customer service, and store layout to something called the “butt-brush effect.” Learn what makes shoppers tick in this Journal of Marketing Education study, in which students shadowed and observed real customers to find out how store environment, retailer tactics, and customer behaviors influenced purchases. The article provides both qualitative and quantitative analyses, and stands as a firm example of the kind of deep learning and real-world experience that marketing students need:

In the process of completing the project, students engage with course content on their own, with their team members, and importantly, within a focal store environment, thus experiencing for themselves the effects of that content on their own shopping behavior, as well as that of others. Compelled by the project’s active pedagogy to engage in discovery, students learn not only the “what” and “why” of marketing concepts, strategies, and techniques but also “how to” implement them.

The article, “Learning Why We Buy: An Experiential Project for the Consumer Behavior Course,” was published by Felicia N. Morgan of the University of West Florida and Deborah Brown McCabe of Menlo College on July 2, 2012. Click here to read on and here to learn more about the Journal of Marketing Education.

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Planned Parenthood’s Social Marketing Success Story

We’re pleased to share an article by Beth Sundstrom of the University of Maryland, “Integrating Public Relations and Social Marketing: A Case Study of Planned Parenthood,” now available in the June 2012 issue of Social Marketing Quarterly. The abstract:

This study examined the relationship between public relations and social marketing in a nonprofit health organization. A case study was conducted, in which internal and external organizational documents, archival records, and artifacts were analyzed and four in-depth interviews were completed. Evidence showed that public relations and social marketing were integrated into the organization’s communication function. Findings provided evidence for a tactical paradigm of public relations, which emphasizes publicity and promotion, as well as a situational approach to messaging and communication functions. The organization engaged the new two-way model of symmetry through cultivating relationships and two-way dialogue. These findings suggest the importance of social marketing approaches to behavior change and relationship cultivation strategies. This case study highlights the success of social marketing initiatives, and the opportunity for social marketing and public relations to evolve together in a new media context.

Click here to read the article in Social Marketing Quarterly and here to learn more about the journal.

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Shelby Hunt on Sustainable Marketing

rawlsnews.ba.ttu.edu

Marketing legend Shelby D. Hunt, the Jerry S. Rawls and P.W. Horn Professor of Marketing at Texas Tech University, published “Toward the Institutionalization of Macromarketing: Sustainable Enterprise, Sustainable Marketing, Sustainable Development, and the Sustainable Society” on August 9, 2012 in the Journal of Macromarketing. A past editor of the Journal of Marketing (1985-1987), he is the author of numerous books, including Marketing Theory: Foundations, Controversy, Strategy, Resource-Advantage Theory (M.E. Sharpe, 2010) and A General Theory of Competition: Resources, Competences, Productivity, Economic Growth (SAGE Publications, 2000). One of the 250 most frequently cited researchers in economics and business (Thompson-ISI), he has written numerous articles on competitive theory, strategy, macromarketing, ethics, relationship marketing, channels of distribution, philosophy of science, and marketing theory. The abstract:

Major events in the institutionalization of macromarketing include (1) the series of macromarketing conferences that began at the University of Colorado in 1976, (2) the founding of the Journal of Macromarketing in 1981, and (3) the establishment of the Macromarketing Society in 2004. This article focuses on the continuing institutionalization of macromarketing by providing a commentary on Mark Peterson’s new textbook, Sustainable Enterprise: A Macromarketing Approach. The commentary is structured around seven questions: (1)What is Peterson’s ‘‘sustainable enterprise’’? (2)What is a macromarketing approach? (3)What is the ‘‘stability illusion’’ and how does Peterson dispel it with resource-advantage (R-A) theory? (4) How does R-A theory relate to sustainable marketing? (5) Does the text contribute to institutionalization or reinstitutionalization? (6)Was the financial crisis a ‘‘failure of laissez-faire’’? (7) Where is the discussion of the ‘‘welfare-state, Ponzi illusion,’’ and the sustainable society?

Click here to continue reading Dr. Hunt’s article in the Journal of Macromarketing and here to learn more about the journal.

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Educating Our Future Business Leaders

target=”blank”>The Cleveland Kid (CC BY 2.0)

Do you have a paper to submit? The Journal of Marketing Education is now accepting research on ethics, corporate social responsibility, sustainability and numerous other topics, welcoming cross-functional submissions about educating our future business leaders.

About the Journal

The Journal of Marketing Education (JME) is the leading international scholarly journal devoted to contemporary issues in marketing education. Its mission is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, information, and experiences related to the process of educating students in marketing and its subfields. Its audience is largely composed of marketing faculty members at institutions of higher education where teaching is an integral component of their overall responsibilities.

The main function of the Journal of Marketing Education is to publish articles focusing on the latest teaching/learning strategies and tactics in marketing education. JME also publishes articles that address various professional issues of importance to marketing faculty members. The journal’s readership is international in scope with significant representation in university libraries.

Submit Papers in these Areas

JME is accepting bylined articles from experts and practitioners on a wide range of topics related to marketing education, including:

• Evaluating teaching effectiveness
• Experiential exercises
• Marketing in developing economies
• Ethics
• Student team projects

JME also plans to publish a special issue on ethics, corporate social responsibility, and sustainability in marketing education, with guest editors Victoria Crittenden and Linda Ferrell. The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2012. Please visit jmd.sagepub.com to view the special issue call for papers.

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to the Editor, Donald R. Bacon, at mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jmed. Authors are expected to review and conform with manuscript submission guidelines prior to making a submission. Questions about the submission process should be forwarded to the Editor at dbacon@du.edu. For more information, please visit jmd.sagepub.com and click “Manuscript Submission.”

Debating the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid,’ 2.0

7D-Kenny (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Back in 2004, the late C.K. Prahalad’s global bestseller “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits” identified the world’s poorest citizens as its fastest growing market, claiming:

If we stop thinking of the poor as victims or as a burden and start recognizing them as resilient and creative entrepreneurs and value-conscious consumers, a whole new world of opportunity will open up. Four billion poor can be the engine of the next round of global trade and prosperity … [and] a source of innovations.

A new article in the Journal of Macromarketing (JMMK) examines this influential concept and offers a new approach.  Arpita Agnihotri of ICFAI University published “Revisiting the Debate over the Bottom of the Pyramid Market” on June 27, 2012 in JMMK. To see more OnlineFirst articles, click here.

Dr. Agnihotri explains in the paper:

This article begins by explaining some of Prahalad’s propositions and the counterarguments critics have made. Then, an extended ‘‘2.0’’ version of the concept is discussed. Based on the principles of cocreation rather than selling to the BOP, this version emphasizes the role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as alliance partners of multinationals. Finally, the article discusses how firms have successfully implemented BOP principles, such as business model innovations and drastic cost reduction to suit products and services, initially meant for a richer segment of society, to the needs of the mass market, thus opening a new channel of revenue generation.

Read the complete article here. To learn more about the Journal of Macromarketing, please follow this link.

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Podcast: Reflections on a Macromarketing Journey

Dr. Tony Pecotich
Professor Emeritus of Marketing,
University of Western Australia

“Anybody who wants to see the way a conference is run, and the way an academic community can be, should attend a macromarketing conference.”

So says Dr. Tony Pecotich, Professor Emeritus of Marketing at the University of Western Australia, esteemed marketing expert and award-winning scholar of the Journal of Macromarketing (JMK).

In this podcast, Dr. Pecotich talks with Dr. Cliff Shultz about his experiences—from mentorship to conducting field research in war-torn Croatia—and draws on extensive knowledge of history, geography and the arts, explaining why broad scholarship is necessary to advance the field of marketing. He talks about implications for society and human welfare, why communist Russia would have been better off had Stalin picked up a macromarketing text, and why he’s never left a macromarketing conference disappointed.

Click here to listen to the interview, “Reflections on a Macromarketing Journey,” and follow this link to subscribe on iTunes.

Anthony (Tony) Pecotich, Professor Emeritus of Marketing at the University of Western Australia, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is a member of the JMK policy board. He has made exemplary contributions to macromarketing for over two decades, with a special emphasis on health care marketing, socioeconomic development, globalization, and distributive justice. Dr. Pecotich has consulted and taught extensively in Australia, the United States, Europe, and Asia, including at the University of Zagreb, University College Dublin, University of Innsbruck, and the Ho Chi Minh City College of Marketing. He has consulted for such corporations as ANZ Bank, Asia Pacific Breweries (S) Pte. Ltd., Capitol Motors (Mercedes Benz) Inc. Taiwan, and Hong Kong Bank (Malaysia). He is a past winner of the Charles Slater Award, given annually for the most outstanding article  published in JMK. He has published widely on macromarketing and other topics, and is co-editor of the Handbook Of Markets and Economies: East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand. He has published in such journals as The Journal of Marketing, Decision Sciences, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, Journal of High Technology Management Research and many others.

Clifford J. Shultz II is Professor and Kellstadt Chair of Marketing in the School of Business Administration at Loyola University Chicago. He received his Ph.D., M. Phil. and M.A. from Columbia University in the City of New York, and his B.A. from DePauw University. Dr. Shultz has expertise on marketing, economic development and consumption in transforming economies, particularly the transition economies of Asia, the Balkans, and other recovering economies. He served two terms as Editor of the Journal of Macromarketing, and has over 150 publications in various scholarly outlets, including the Columbia Journal of World Business, Contemporary Southeast Asia, Business Horizons, Psychology and Marketing, Marketing Management, Research in Consumer Behavior, Journal of Applied Social Psychology and others. Dr. Shultz also served as President of the International Society of Markets and Development, and currently serves on several editorial and policy boards, including Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Trzište, Vietnam Marketing Journal, Applied Research in Quality of Life, and Consumption, Markets and Culture.

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