Denial at the top table: status attributions and implications for marketing

Senior marketing management is seldom represented on the Board of Directors nowadays, reflecting a deteriorating status of the marketing profession. We examine some of the key reasons for marketing’s demise, and discuss how the status of marketing may be restored by demonstrating the value of marketing to the business community. We attribute marketing’s demise to several related key factors: narrow typecasting, marginalisation and limited involvement in product development, questionable marketing curricula, insensitivity toward environmental change, questionable professional standards and roles, and marketing’s apparent lack of accountability to CEOs. Each of these leads to failure to communicate, create, or deliver value within marketing. We argue that a continued inability to deal with marketing’s crisis of representation will further erode the status of the discipline both academically and professionally

Marketing strategy implementation in higher education. A mixed approach for model development and testing

This study seeks to extend our knowledge of marketing strategy implementation in the context of international student recruitment. Strategy implementation remains an area of limited focus in the marketisation of higher education literature. Employing a mixed-design methodology on universities in the UK, US, Australia, and New Zealand, a conceptual model is presented and tested on 570 mid-level international marketing managers. Four overall constructs are found to be significant strategy implementation factors: implementation related outcome variables, dimensions of commitment, strategy, and role factors. In light of these findings, several implications are advanced for university management. The study also makes important theoretical contributions: it contributes to a growing body of literature on marketing of higher education; it adds a more nuanced theoretical foundation of marketing strategy implementation by focusing on academic institutions rather than business firms; and it enriches the theory of marketing strategy implementation by taking a cross-national analytical approach