Not worth the paper they’re written on

The literature on marketing’s virtue tends to centre on marketing practices (Skinner, 2005), with only limited consideration of marketing education in relation to sustainability, mostly considering the inclusion of sustainability issues in the curriculum rather than the way marketing is taught. Gummesson (2002) argues that textbooks have failed to provide practical guidance for either students or practitioners. To this we add the observation that marketing's professional bodies are complicit in the process: by insisting that the curriculum is defined by a comparatively narrow set of constructs, and then by focusing assessment around didactic methods, these bodies have effected a further shift towards a comparatively limited learning agenda as well as a reliance on a restricted range of paper-based core texts (see also Brown 1995). We contend that, despite continuing to be promoted by marketing educators as a key route to learning, marketing textbooks have become of little relevance to our ‘Homo Zappien’ students (Veen and Vrakking, 2007), fail to deliver effective solutions to meet our target markets’ needs, and that this situation has been both influenced by, and has helped perpetuate, the false consciousness of target markets, including students, employers, academics, practitioners (Pereira and DaSilva, 2002, Hackley, 2003), the end consumers of marketers’ efforts and society at large (Wilkie and Moore, 1999). Moreover, we also contend that the continued production and promotion of such textbooks fails to fully engage marketing educators and our students with the sustainability agenda and the attendant concerns of our stakeholders.