Does Marketing Need Better Marketing? A Creative Approach to Understanding Student Perceptions of the Marketing Major.

Marketing is often used to correct misperceptions and better align them with reality. Ironically, the discipline of marketing itself currently faces a misalignment between negative public perceptions of the field and the reality of marketing's vital role as a business function. The question this study addresses is: does this misalignment carry over to the academic community, and specifically, undergraduate business students? This paper surveys graduating business students, using semantic differential scaling to measure degree of interest and amount of learning in the nine core undergraduate business courses. The paper then focuses on the core marketing course to examine perceptions of both the marketing field and the marketing major. An innovative qualitative technique using word clouds reveals several diametrically opposing associations that students make of marketing (easy/hard, essential/useless, love/hate) both within the group of marketing majors and between majors and nonmajors. Given that today's business students will likely become tomorrow's business leaders, this study suggests that the marketing discipline may need to do a better job of marketing itself to create a consistent and positive image of the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]