Search

The outbreak of COVID-19 was a major disruption to higher education and marketing education across the globe. COVID-19 impacted not only our campuses, but also how we teach and our students. As marketing academicians, we must respond to the educational risk posed to COVID-19 to facilitate educational success in the future. We conducted an exploratory survey of 118 marketing department chairs in the U.S. representing all regions of the country in August and September of 2020. The survey data provides valuable insights into how marketing department chairs perceive educational risk and challenges under COVID-19 and how they established coping strategies, to mitigate risk including internal efforts, benchmarking, communications, and the implementation of technological/instructional support. We then examine the effects of COVID-19 on the adjustment of teaching plans for Fall 2020, marketing course content, and job placement. Finally, we explore how to improve satisfaction with the risk management process while setting best practices to move forward under COVID-19. We found that overall the satisfaction with the COVID-19 management process was high, communicating about COVID-19 on the institution's website increased perceived educational risk, and the departments that benchmarked produced higher satisfaction with the process rankings by faculty.

Purpose – Online communities designed to appeal to children are on the rise. The success of this marketplace phenomenon indicates that adolescents are likely candidates for brand community membership; however, the literature has yet to examine this trend. This research aims to address this gap and establish the likely existence of brand community involvement among adolescents. It further seeks to explore the characteristics which may differentiate children who are more likely to become involved in brand communities and examine what impact their involvement may have on adolescents' psychological well-being. Design/methodology/approach – A national online panel was employed to collect survey data from respondents aged 7-18 and their parents. Findings – The results support the existence of a high brand community involvement segment among adolescents. Adolescents high in brand community involvement are found to display noteworthy differences in attitudes, values, and marketplace behaviors. Several interesting avenues of future research are proposed. Originality/value – To the authors' knowledge this is the first study attempting to measure differences between adolescents who measure high and low in brand community involvement. Of particular interest are the results indicating that adolescents involved in brand communities may have important distinguishing attitudes and values and exhibit noteworthy differences in their marketplace behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]