Building the Technology Toolkit of Marketing Students: The Emerging Technologies in Marketing Initiative

New information technologies are transforming marketing practice, leading to calls for marketing academics to focus their research and teaching more tightly on areas relevant to practitioners. Developments in e-commerce, business geographic information systems (GIS), and social media offer powerful marketing tools to nontechnical users. This paper describes one department's effort to integrate these tools through an Emerging Technologies in Marketing Initiative spanning several marketing courses. It describes the development, underlying principles, pedagogical content, and academic structure of the Initiative. The paper also evaluates the performance of the Initiative and discusses the potential for and difficulties of replicating it at other institutions.