Consumer Insights: A Turning Point for Marketing Research Education

There is an elephant in the room. We need to talk about it. So we are just going to come out and say it—the marketing research class is boring, and it is not clear whether students like it as it is currently structured and delivered. Unfortunately, that is our fault as marketing educators. Ouch! The first step is admitting we have a problem. Not just a small one, either. Now that we have settled that, we are liberated to talk about the why and how, so we can identify a solution and begin moving forward. Let us start at the beginning. Marketing research is one of the central pillars of marketing education programs around the world. Almost all accredited business schools offer research courses as a core, and almost always as a required course in a program of study for marketing majors. Literally thousands of professors have developed and taught marketing research classes, and many hundreds of thousands of students have taken these classes. Yet despite its ubiquity, the marketing research class is not one students tend to look forward to, and we have known this for decades (Castleberry, 2001; Mills, 2010). Traditionally, there have been two critical issues driving the lack of student enthusiasm. First, the marketing research class is inherently filled with relatively dry subject matter that is difficult to make interesting, engaging, and relevant for students (Bridges, 1999; Talafuse, 2021). Second, marketing students in particular have relatively high levels of anxiety when it comes to anything quantitative in nature (Freeman & Spanjaard, 2012; Tarasi et al., 2013). Flip to the introductory paragraph of almost any journal article about marketing research education in the past 50 or so years, and you will most likely find references to one or both of these trends. More recently with the digital revolution of industry, marketing research education has not kept pace with the needs of industry employers (Vriens et al., 2019), which further stifles student enthusiasm toward the course. In the grand scheme of their educational portfolio, marketing research is almost always at the bottom of the students’ enthusiasm ladder. Faculty enthusiasm levels toward the course are generally similar. The marketing research class is often seen by faculty as the dry, distinctly uncool counterbalance to course topics with caché like digital marketing, social media, sales, and promotions (FitzPatrick et al., 2010). For many marketing faculty other than the handful of miraculous souls among us who relish the opportunity to teach the nuances of binomial regression, or even simpler topics like correlation, marketing research is a “must-teach” rather than a “get-to-teach” type class. There is, of course, an unsurprising dearth of literature in support of this claim despite being widely known among faculty (thus, we are using our editorial prerogative here). There is, however, substantial evidence of consistently lower-than-average course evaluations for faculty who teach the marketing research course (Simpson & Siguaw, 2000), which exacerbates the problem. Moreover, low teaching evaluations often have ramifications for faculty, particularly before tenure (Bridges, 1999). In sum, we have a course that essentially everyone (both students and faculty), everywhere is exposed to but nobody is particularly excited about. While this is disappointing at first blush, the remarkable opportunity before us for structural improvement is quite exhilarating. Like all marketing problems, we must figure out the nature of why the problem exists before we can attempt to correct it.