Teaching English to Marketing Students

The marketing sector has been experiencing substantial changes due to the constant need to adjust to apace-evolving markets and demands. Digital development takes on an important role in this scenario, which may not be echoing in marketing education. Thus, there is an increasing discussion surrounding the skills required of marketing graduates in the current educational and professional set. Given that English proficiency is ranked as crucial by stakeholders, and it seems not to translate into many Portuguese marketing programs, the goal of this chapter is to provide a holistic view over the state of the art on the match/gap between the language skills developed in marketing programs and those expected from practitioners and marketing professionals in the 21st century. The results of the content analysis showed that (in)formal communication in English, namely through emails, instant messaging, and social media, should be recognized as a core competence within the marketing curriculum.

Business Within Ethical Marketing Education

The purpose of this chapter is to offer a new perspective on how business ethics, and more specifically ethical marketing, can be integrated into ethical education and the teaching of good practices, providing answers for different organizational ethical questions. The authors argue that ethical marketing currently plays a pivotal role in organizations, making it necessary to properly address issues from a moral point of view. Referring to elements related to the marketing area, such as the market itself, costumers, products, promotion, price, place, etc., the authors demonstrate that ethics and its purpose can add value to any organization. The sphere of ethical marketing has had extraordinary visibility, especially throughout the last decades, probably because of how they relate to the four marketing-mix P's. The authors argue that it is crucial to have a solid understanding of the significance of these principles.

Engaging Students and Communities Through Service Learning and Community-Academia Partnerships

In this chapter, the authors present cases from four teaching marketing education experiences, based on community engagement and service learning principles. The cases address environmental and social issues (i.e., waste minimization [Lebanon], food consumption [Denmark], intellectual disability [Ireland], water consumption, and plastic waste reduction [Switzerland]). This chapter stems from discussions generated during a thematic workshop the authors organized at the 3rd European Social Marketing Conference, held in Espoo, Finland, on September 22, 2016. Through these cases, the authors aim to stimulate critical reflection on the role of service learning in the broader marketing education and on the intersection between education and profession.

Bridging the Gap Between Marketing Education and the Marketing Profession

Professionals and scholars have discussed the unprecedented pace of change currently experienced by businesses. The dynamics facing business today offer rich insight into the challenges facing university graduates. In this chapter, the authors apply a dynamic capabilities (DCs) view of new graduate employability. Dynamic capabilities theory is rooted in the resource-based view that posits organizations create a competitive advantage by acquiring or developing resources that are rare, valuable, and hard to imitate and replace. They argue that employability can be viewed as the complex integration and application of four specific DCs: (1) intelligence resources, (2) personality resources, (3) meta-skill resources, and (4) job-specific resources. The authors view new graduate competitive advantage as dependent on the ability of university graduates to mobilize and exploit the linkages of these resources throughout their university study years. In adopting these resource categories, they build on previous work and propose a conceptual model to evaluate a new graduate's competitive position in an employment marketplace. In this chapter, the authors provide a prescription for how educators and students can apply an integrated dynamic capability view of new graduate employability to support the professional development of marketing students through the development of a comprehensive personal product roadmap.

A Constructivist Approach to Marketing Education

This chapter offers a constructivist approach to marketing education aimed at coping with some of the most significant challenges faced by the marketing profession: the globalization of business, the growing digitalization of economy and society, and the increasing consumer expectations on being treated as unique and distinctive. To deal successfully with these challenges, marketing education must foster students' development at three levels: more knowledge, new skills, and an attitude of commitment towards the learning process. In other words, it is not only about promoting “knowledge” and “know-how” but also about stimulating “how to be,” preparing future professionals for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. This means that the success of marketing education does not depend exclusively on the contents of the courses and teachers' scientific skills but also on what students are encouraged to collectively do.

Marketing Reflections for Our Reform and Reset

From time to time, we marketers should reflect upon what we have done for the world and to the world. We should examine the paradigms, practices, and broader impacts that have shaped our reputation. As a community of practitioners, scholars, and teachers, we have grown accustomed to common criticisms about what we do and how we do it. In calling consumerism the shame of marketing, Peter Drucker left us a prompt to consider for our reform and reset. In our ongoing journey to satisfy consumers and achieve organizational objectives, we must not lose sight of our responsibilities to create value, maximize our positive impact on society, and minimize our negative impact on society. In this brief chapter, the author presents thoughts on how we marketers might improve our discipline.

Bridging the Academic-Practitioner Divide in Marketing

In recent years, marketing practice has increased in complexity, becoming more challenging. This situation demands that marketing professionals be better prepared to face the difficulties of the market. Business schools play a key role in training marketing professionals. However, there is a strong divide between the expectations held by marketing professionals and those held in academia. This chapter considers this phenomenon from a theoretical point of view and explores its causes. The author argues that business schools are able to play a key role in bridging theory and practice in marketing. The chapter closes by offering several suggestions for how business schools might increase the relevance of marketing research while reducing the gap between marketing theory and practice. In particular, the chapter offers a set of policies that business schools can implement in order to close this gap.

New Course Design to Reply Uncertainty

The importance of students' preparedness to work immediately after university, industry demand of specific graduates, and current trends in marketing studies are pushing university to reconsider their traditional marketing programs by including more interdisciplinary perspectives, such as innovation and technology management. However, innovation theory is relatively new for marketing research, while studies on the extent to which marketing education should encompass innovation theory are still limited. Drawing upon the exploitation of the thresholds concepts, the chapter proposes a new approach to design an innovative course based on the integration of innovation theory with marketing management for postgraduate marketing students to address this challenge. These threshold concepts would emerge as the core concepts for synthesizing innovation theory and marketing management for supporting the development of the new marketing programs.

Intersections in Marketing Practice and Marketing Education

This chapter will describe the value of bridging the gaps between marketing practice and marketing education. The objective is to improve students' academic and practical experience after they complete a marketing degree program. This focus is on how professors can become better educators by targeting what students need to know before they complete academic programs. The chapter provides insights via expert interviews and analysis, using examples of the intersections and the gaps between theoretical marketing principles and practical applications of marketing strategies. The goal is to illustrate best practices and narrow the gaps to maintain relevance in a fast-changing marketing environment.

Marketing

This chapter shows how universities have to change the way they deal with marketing. First, marketing matters to many other actors than their traditional students, so the way marketing is taught has to change as well as the way universities organize their offers. At the same time, marketing may help universities adapt their offers to the specific needs of the society. Universities have to get closer to their communities and help them become more entrepreneurial, more sustainable, and improve the quality of life of their citizens, therefore contributing to a better world.