Reimagining marketing education – paradoxes marketing academics experience when introducing sustainability in the marketing curriculum

To improve sustainability education in marketing, sustainability needs to be included in the marketing curriculum in higher education. However, traditional, or mainstream, marketing courses do not usually actively encourage such topics. Marketing courses are still predominantly trapped in the dominant paradigm, ideology, centred around the need for continuous economic growth, consumption, and profits. This dominant logic still focusses mostly on material accumulation (Kemper et al, 2020). For making the shift to a sustainable society, a paradigm shift is required in the marketing curriculum in higher education because marketing students will be the marketing managers of tomorrow. Marketing scholars thus need to teach them how to incorporate sustainability in their future marketing decisions. As de Ruyter et al. (2022) mention, the very definition of effective marketing strategy needs to be reimagined; they call for the “facilitation of better marketing strategy that will boldly address society’s grand challenges” (p. 20). Studies have so far largely ignored issues related to the integration of sustainability in individual academic scholarship while academics in business schools are continuously confronted with tensions related to the continuous growth and profit-oriented ideology that business schools embody (Kemper et al. 2020). The purpose of this special session is to organize a discussion with the audience around the paradoxes and tensions marketing scholars experience when including sustainability in their courses, as well as how they do so and how they resolve (or not) the tensions. The objective of the special session is to better understand how marketing educators are bringing sustainability to the forefront of marketing education practices and are incorporating sustainability issues into course curriculum, pedagogical approaches, and discussions. The interactive session will start with two impulse presentations and continue with a discussion with the audience