A step change in marketing communication education - the next urgent steps for research

ABSTRACT

Our world, and our workplace, has undergone a disruptive step change. It has transformed the way universities operate, what industry demands, how we teach and the way our students learn. That is why this special issue, and particularly this paper, takes three important steps to bring insight and innovation to marketing communication education. In our first step, we examine the impact of COVID on student learning. This leads us to where we are now and a visualization the experiential world of students, using a customer experience framework. The next step is to use this framework to reinvent the Biggs 3P Model into an integrated learning experience, showing student innovation, acceptance and adaption to change. This takes us to Step 3 and our agenda for research.

KEYWORDS:

• Marketing Communication Education
• step change
• past-present-future
• research agenda

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gayle Kerr

Gayle Kerr passion for advertising began as a copywriter working in the industry for more than a decade. She shifted from writing advertising to researching and teaching it as a Professor in the School of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations at QUT. Gayle’s PhD was first in Australia in the field of IMC and her work in teaching, research and industry engagement was recognized with the inaugural Don Schultz Award for Innovation in IMC Teaching, Research and Practice 2022. Gayle has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles and conference papers on creativity, digital media, advertising and IMC. She was the founding President of the Australia and New Zealand Academy of Advertising and served on the Executive of the American Academy of Advertising. She also served as Deputy Editor of the Journal of Marketing Communications for more than a decade.

Ian Lings

Ian Lings is Professor of Marketing and Head of the School of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations at the QUT Business School, Brisbane. His research on “firm – employee – customer” interfaces has been published in a range of journals. Ian co-authored the research focussed, Sage title: “Doing Business Research: A Guide to Theory and Practice”. Ian authored the seminal article on Internal Market Orientation (IMO), synthesising knowledge from the fields of operations management, human resources management, psychology and marketing to develop a model describing the physical and socio-emotional processes of service delivery. He developed, validated, and subsequently published the first measure of IMO. This measure has been adopted internationally and applied by a number of teams to new organisational contexts. He has undertaken research for a range of clients in differing industries and across different countries. Ian has led or contributed to a range of industry and government funded research projects including projects for the Australian Centre for Research Collaboration in Rail, involving researcher from several universities and representatives from organisations in the Australian rail industry and a large Australian Research Council Linkage project.

Philip J. Kitchen

Philip J. Kitchen, PhD is Professor of Marketing at the triple-accredited ICN-Artem School of Business, Nancy, France. Emeritus Professor - University of Salford, UK, and Brock University, Canada. Editor - Journal of Marketing Communications and Founder of the International Conference on Corporate and Marketing Communications (held annually since 1996). Has served as guest editor for the European Journal of Marketing formerly. He has Published over 250 papers in journals including Journal of Business Research, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Advertising Research, International Journal of Advertising, International Journal of Human Resource Management among others, together with 22 published books on marketing communications, corporate communications, marketing management and marketing theory. Ranked 6th in terms of Business and Management Research in France in research.com August, 2023. Listed as one of the 'The Top 50 Gurus who …influenced the Future of Marketing', Marketing Business, December 2003, 12-16; and as 6th in terms of ‘Top Scholarly Output’ in UK and all of Europe (2017-2020), Scival Elsevier, 2020. Fellow of CIM, RSA, HEA, IOD; and Member of the ALCS and Institute of Marketing Science (USA).