Marketing Education: Perspectives of Highly Involved E-Business Practitioners

Practitioner involvement in education can be beneficial in providing links to test practice against theory, to offer authentic, current, and relevant examples to students, and to provide some guidance to faculty in the consideration of curriculum development issues. These links are particularly valuable in the dynamic world of e-commerce. The purpose of this study was to gain insight from electronic-business practitioners who may be considered “highly involved” with e-commerce about their perceptions of the knowledge that students ought to possess for future employability. To marketing practitioners and educators, electronic commerce represents a wealth of challenges. Among the challenges for practitioners are coping with an environment of dynamic change, implementing strategy to utilize and/or respond to technological innovation, and evaluating its effectiveness. Among the challenges for marketing educators are anticipating change, relating theory to innovative practice, and incorporating these ideas into educational curricula in a timely and relevant manner. As in other areas of marketing education, practitioner involvement can be beneficial in providing the link to practice that enables educators to test practice against theory and offer authentic, current, and relevant examples to their students. Because of the dynamic nature of electronic commerce, these practitioner-educator links are particularly crucial. But this raises a relevant question: Do business practitioners with high web involvement possess different perceptions than other business practitioners with respect to the kinds of educational preparation and knowledge students of business should have? One purpose of this investigation was to identify a set of highly web-involved business practitioners, then to ascertain whether these practitioners’ perceptions about marketing education differed from the perceptions of less web-involved practitioners. These perceptions could offer insights about future directions for marketing curriculum.