RETHINKING THE PRINCIPLES OF MARKETING COURSE: FOCUS ON EXCHANGE Susan Dobscha and Ellen R. Foxman Marketing educators agree that exchange is a core concept in marketing education. Nevertheless, exchange is virtually ignoredintheprinciplesofmarketingcourse,whikthe4P'sandstrateg]/modeldominatesthecurriculum.Thispaper provides a new model for marketing education based on the established concept of exchange. The new model facilitates better integration of a broad variety of marketing phenomena in the course material and provides marketing educators with an outline for redesigning their introductory marketing classes to reflect the global marketplace. Introduction In his classic paper, "Marketing as Exchange," Bagozzi (1975) asserted that, "The exchange concept is a key factor in understanding the expanding role of market- ing" {p.32). This assertion is echoed in virtually every marketing textbook, where exchange is presented as the cornerstone of marketing. Most textbook authors define marketing as a process of exchange that should be anticipated and managed (Evans and Berman 1997). Even in the most recent textbooks, exchange is pre- sented as the guiding principle of marketing: "'to cre- ate exchanges...' in the definition of marketing identi- fies the heart of every marketing act" (Solomon and Stuart 1997, p. 5). This emphasis on exchange is rein- forced by the definition developed by the American Marketing Association: Marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of idea.s, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational objectives (American Marketing Association as quoted from Lamb, Hair, and McDanicl 1992, p. 4, emphasis added). Though exchange figures prominently in nearly ev- ery definition of marketing, the "4 P's strategy" model SUSAN DOBSCHA is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Bentlcy College. She holds an undergraduate and master's degree from the University of Now Mexico and a Ph.D. from Virginia Polytechnic Instituteand State University. Her areas of interest include marketing education, consumer resistance to marketing, and gender issues in marketing. Her work appears in thellarvard Business Review. Academy of Marketing Science Proceedings as well as the Association for Consumer Research Proceedings. ELLEN R. FOXMAN is an Asstxiate Professor of Marketingat Bontley College. She holds undergraduate and master's degrees from the University of Rochester and a Ph.D. from Louisiana State University. Her research is in the areas of consumer behavior, public policy issues, and more recently, marketing education. She has published in journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing. Journal of Consumer Affairs, and Journal of Business Research, as well as other scholarly journals. (i.e., marketing strategy=target market-nl P's—see Fig- ure 1) is far more influential in marketing education. Houston and Gassenheimer (1987) observed that, while marketing texts pay lip service to the concept of ex- change, they fail to use it to explain and organize mar- keting phenomena. Presented in all textbook defini- tions, exchange is then effectively dismissed, and Ihe 4 P's strategy model structures the principles of market- ing course. In this paper, we advocate adopting ex- change as the organizing concept of the marketing prin- ciples course and develop a preliminary structure for such a course. We begin by identifying the deficiencies of the 4 P's model. We then examine the current struc- ture of principles of marketing textbooks. We then present and justify an exchange framework. We con- clude the paper with three practical recommendations for marketing educators who wish to incorporate the exchange framework into their current courses. It is easy to understand why the 4 P's model, which was conceived during the same era that saw the emer- gence of the exchange paradigm, made its way into textbooks and became the guiding principle for educat- ing marketing students. It was marketable: memorable, catchy, and informative. It afforded marketing educa- tors an organizational tool and students a simple mne- monic device that facilitated leaming. Because of this, the 4 P's model is the central organizing principle for marketing education in even the most modem of today's texts (Wardlow 1997). Unfortunately, the 4 P's model is deficient in its pre- sentation of marketing tools and concepts. First, the current model does not account for many "boundary spanning" topics. The lines drawn between functional areas have blurred considerably since the inception of the 4 P's model. For example, how does an educator fit neatly into the 4 P's model the new phenomena of online-shopping, television shopping networks, and Marketing Education Review, Volume 8, Number 1 (Spring 1998).