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Increasingly, professional sales programs receive financial support from company sponsors in exchange for varying types of branding and recruiting opportunities. This study builds on the literature regarding employer branding and talent acquisition by examining the effect sales program sponsorship has on students. Grounded in organizational reputation theories, brand equity, and the literature on corporate sponsorship, it is proposed that sponsoring a sales program leads to positive student-firm related perceptions. Additionally, it is predicted that classroom engagement in the form of coteaching enhances these positive effects. Two natural field experiments, one involving two semesters of professional sales students (n = 90), the other involving four semesters of professional sales students (n = 174), are conducted to test the conceptual model. Results confirm the study's predictions that sponsoring firms are perceived more favorably by students, and classroom engagement enhances these positive perceptions. Finally, results suggest that firms with lower initial familiarity among students have the most to gain in terms of enhancing student perceptions through coteaching.

The crossroads of scholar and marketer concerns related to healthy social media usage is where this study extends the burgeoning literature on consumer well‐being in the digital area by exploring the topic of social media wellness, made more salient during the pandemic era. Consumers spend increasing amounts of time on social media despite experiencing numerous negative repercussions. Various disciplines have contributed to the examination of this topic; however, scant research has been conducted within the consumer research or marketing disciplines. Therefore, this paper aims to shed light on the need for social media wellness by (1) highlighting issues related to social media consumption, (2) introducing a conceptual definition of social media wellness, (3) exploring consumers' perceptions and experiences of social media usage through topic analysis, and (4) providing a research agenda for scholars to pursue. Following an exploratory observation of common topics surrounding social media wellness, specific hashtags and their corresponding posts were gathered from Twitter and then examined using the topic modeling method Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Implications and future research are discussed accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media wellness is an emerging topic due to the numerous adverse effects of social media (SM) usage, yet it is an uncommon topic in marketing curricula and research. This paper introduces this novel topic as an opportunity to extend macromarketing curricula. Following a class survey and activity, an analysis of 187 respondents indicates that the majority of students feel that too much SM consumption may impact their time management, course success, and well-being. Many students note they consume more SM than desired, and they overwhelmingly agree that this topic should be included in marketing curricula and that marketers should consider consumers' SM wellness. These findings highlight the importance of the SM wellness topic integration into course materials to enhance students' awareness and behavior with SM, with an opportunity to enhance systems-thinking. We close with recommended resources and activities where students take an active role to reflect, critically evaluate, and ideate on how this impacts consumers and marketers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]