Marketing a Department: One Chair’s Experience in Curriculum Revision

As every Marketing professional comes to know, Marketing concepts are easy to understand but difficult to practice. It is only through the practice of disciplined marketing that any given organization can realize the benefits of its marketing capabilities, yet there seems to be persisting difficulty in putting marketing principles into practice due in part to continuing confusion about the scope of marketing operations among practitioners and also due to a lack of commitment, talent, skills, and/or resources. The department chair, as a leader and manager of an academic department, is by no means exempt from the necessity of practicing disciplined marketing. This paper presents the learning experience that the author encountered as she set out to practice marketing in managing the duties of a department chair in a mid-sized state university. The purposes of this paper are twofold: to reinforce the important role of marketing and to encourage fellow academic department chairs to enhance their own effectiveness by putting customer value-driven marketing into practice.