No abstract

Reaching students hinges on understanding them and how they communicate. Marketing education, like education in other disciplines, must fit into the lives of the students. While education must challenge and transform students, it should also include recognition of the way that they think and communicate. Thus, the choices that we as instructors make in the classroom have both direct and indirect effects. Our decisions concerning teaching pedagogy lead to changes in the way that students work together and learn class material. These decisions, in turn, can have potentially long-term formative effects on their work habits and pursuit of knowledge in general. Jackson, Boostrom, and Hansen (1993) point out that classes not only attempt to impart knowledge, but also play a role in how students develop their character and see themselves and others. In short, the choices we make in how we communicate with students can affect our direct effects, including the amount of marketing knowledge that they gain, as well as our indirect effects, such as their readiness to effectively engage with the larger professional community once they graduate.As new tools for communication emerge, it is important for educators to consider their inclusion in the classroom so that students can use communication formats that are either familiar, used by marketing professionals, or can improve the quality of the class. With this in mind, we looked at differing Internet technologies and the availability of new communication tools that would be both a help in communicating useful classroom information and offer forms of expression and communication that were not available in our school's implementation of the Blackboard online class communication tool. We saw this as a way to possibly enhance the virtual element of team management and thus give our students an opportunity to develop skills associated with virtual teams.Recently, Boostrom, Kurthakoti, and Summey (2009) investigated the use of a Ning.com-based social network as a communication tool for students in a marketing research class. The goal with this project is to build on those findings by (1) using a Ning social network and collecting student data in more than one type of marketing class, (2) comparing those data to responses of students using Blackboard during the same period, and (3) offering more information broadly related to the use of social networking as a tool for class delivery.

This study examines the impact of brand-character association on consumer attitude toward the placed brand. A 2x2 within subjects experiment, using a full-length movie as a stimulus, was conducted on a panel of student subjects to assess the interaction effect of character-brand valence on consumer attitude. Results support a significant interaction between character and brand valence. Analyses also indicate that congruency between character and brand valence enhances affective measures toward the placed brand, supporting the congruency theory and Meaning Transfer Model. Additionally, we found that brand familiarity mediates the character-valence interaction. Limitations and Implications of the studies were also discussed.

Motivated by the growing role of online transactions and Web-related Word-Of-Mouth (WWOM) in the consumer behavior domain, we propose a theoretical model that relates two antecedents (consumers' community and content ownership) to attitudes toward four WWOM tools (Viral Marketing, Consumer-Produced Ads, Consumer Web Logs, and Collaborative Filters). The model and related hypotheses are empirically tested with the structural equation modeling (SEM) approach, using data from a large-scale survey. Results validated most of the proposed hypotheses and generated new insights. For example, we found that the direct relation between consumers' community and their attitude toward blogs was completely mediated by their sense of content ownership. Finally, we delineate the limitations of the study and outline directions for future research.