Journal of Marketing Education

Special Issue Call for Papers

Consumer Insights: Marketing Research and Marketing Analytics

Submission Deadline: June 1, 2020

This special issue of the Journal of Marketing Education seeks to invigorate conversations related to the teaching of one of the most ubiquitous albeit pedagogically under-researched areas of the marketing curriculum: the science and practice of consumer insights.

Marketing Research is a core course in undergraduate marketing curricula, and a required class for marketing majors at almost all accredited business schools around the world. Thousands of professors have developed and taught marketing research classes. But despite its ubiquity, the marketing research course has long been and continues to be considered one of the most tedious for both faculty and students.

The marketing research course presents faculty with a number of challenges that are less evident in other marketing classes. The most pressing is the persistent challenge of the course’s relatively dry subject matter, and the task of making content interesting and engaging for students (Bridges, 1999). Another challenge stems from the common practice of orienting the marketing research course primarily around quantitative and statistical analysis (Freeman & Spanjaard, 2012), which can be particularly perplexing for marketing students, who tend to have chronic anxiety around anything quantitative in nature (Tarasi, Wilson, Puri & Divine, 2012). As a result, research courses commonly see lower-than-average course evaluations, which may have ramifications for faculty evaluations (Bridges, 1999).

To address these challenges and more, this special issue invites papers relating to any of the following topics:

• Marketing research course design
• Balancing qualitative and quantitative methods
• Theoretical education vs vocational training
• Teaching data collection versus data analysis
• The influence of technology on the MR course
• Sourcing, using and using secondary data
• Artificial intelligence and marketing research
• Student engagement in the research class
• Classroom innovations

With the explosion of digital technology, the scope and science of consumer insights has expanded, and the field of marketing analytics has proliferated across the marketing curricula like wildfire. The appeal of analytics as an employable skill desired by employers has motivated many institutions to develop courses, majors and degree specializations in marketing analytics (Hartley, Routon & Torres, 2018; Schlee & Harich, 2010). Pedagogical research on analytics course design and delivery, however, remains noticeably sparse in the marketing education literature despite the dramatic shift in focus away from seeking answers to questions and toward seeking answers from data. Thus, this special issue of JME also invites papers that explore:

• Theoretical and practical boundaries between marketing research and marketing analytics
• Accommodating demand for analytics content at resource-constrained institutions
• Overcoming quantitative anxiety
• Data quality and management
• Structured and unstructured data
• Data visualization
• Text mining and sentiment analysis
• Ethics in marketing analytics
• Leveraging big data for CRM
• Linking analytics to strategy and other courses

Potential contributors should feel free to contact the coeditors with any questions. All manuscripts will be judged on their scholarly merits and overall ability to advance the marketing and business education literature. Authors should follow the style guidelines found at

journals.sagepub.com/home/jmd

with all submissions via the Journal of Marketing Education editorial manager on the journal website. The following are the special issue co-editors:

Joe F. Hair, Jr., University of South Alabama
jhair@southalabama.edu

Adam J. Mills, Loyola University New Orleans
ajmills@loyno.edu

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