Bridging the academic-practitioner divide in marketing: The role of business schools Andre Vilares Morgado AESE Business School, Portugal ABSTRACT In recent years, marketing practice has increased in complexity, becoming more challenging. This situation demands that marketing professionals be better prepared to face the difficulties of the market. Business schools play a key role in training marketing professionals. However, there is a strong divide between the expectations held by marketing professionals and those held in academia. This chapter considers this phenomenon from a theoretical point of view and explores its causes. The author argues that business schools are able to play a key role in bridging theory and practice in marketing. The chapter closes by offering several suggestions for how business schools might increase the relevance of marketing research while reducing the gap between marketing theory and practice. In particular, the chapter offers a set of policies that business schools can implement in order to close this gap. Keywords: Academia, Business Schools, Case Study, Executive Education, Faculty, Marketing, Research. INTRODUCTION In 2017, the author of this chapter attended the First Congress of Portuguese Managers, promoted by the Business Administrators Forum 1 , an entity that represents Portuguese professional management. This event was attended by almost 300 professional managers (the majority of which were C-level managers). A handful of university representatives also attended the event. These attendees were in charge of promoting executive education services, as the event was a welcome opportunity to network. No scholars were to be found among the participants. The event had 19 speakers. Of these, only one cited data and findings from scholarly research during his presentation. In parallel, the author has attended the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Group annual conference for the last 3 years. The Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Group assembles scholars concerned with developing theoretical concepts and scientific knowledge in the field of business-to-business marketing and purchasing. The Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Group annual conference (organized for the first time in 1984) is the largest conference on marketing in a business-to-business context in the world. The three annual conferences held in 2015, 2016 and 2017 were not attended by any professional managers, with the exception of invited keynote speakers, who were present at the opening day of each conference and delivered a talk featuring their entrepreneurial and business activities. This is an odd setting for understanding the impact of management research on business practice and evaluating the gaps and intersections between marketing education and practice. In fact, the two examples cited above reveal the extent to which these two worlds remain apart: the world of business research and the world of management practice. The same phenomenon takes place in the marketing setting, where practice and scholarly research can be seen as independent activities.