The ability for students to work within a team environment has long been a skill set prized by most marketing educators and practitioners. What has not been altogether clear is how to best learn such skills. Some educators would argue that along with the “good,” there is truly some “bad” and “ugly” inherent in the framework many use to teach teamwork. The authors of this study focus on the use of group projects in the classroom. Results suggest that educators need to reexamine this issue to ensure that marketing students are developing both discipline-related and support skills.

The purpose of this article is to review the marketing literature concerning perceived risk and to offer a conceptual application of this literature to the mail order catalog shopping purchase situation. Five specific types of perceived risk are presented and discussed in relation to risk reduction techniques applicable to each. The author's conceptualizations concerning perceived risk are an attempt to promote academic empirical research, as well as to enhance practitioners' understanding of their o w n current and future efforts toward expanding the database of receptive mail order catalog shoppers.

With the phenomenal growth of direct order marketing with the Internet and catalogs as alternative channels, customers increasingly face more choices of where to purchase goods and services. This paper develops a formal consumer model to explain channel switching behavior. Becker’s theory of time allocation is expanded to consumer decision making between distribution channels. The final model suggests that consumers face a tradeoff when deciding where to buy goods and services. From this tradeoff an indifference curve is developed where the consumer chooses between alternative distribution channels on the basis of the relative opportunity costs of time, costs of goods, pleasure derived from shopping, perceived value of goods, and relative risk of each channel. Strategies for direct and multi‐channel marketers are developed using this model.

Basic and discipline-specific technological competencies are needed by marketing and business school faculty, students, and their employers. Integration of basic technologies is common and easily accepted among younger students and readily supported, at least philosophically if not practically, by most business schools. Conversely, many marketing and business faculty face difficulties and problems with integration of new and discipline-specific technologies. The authors propose that these difficulties are most likely due to limited budgets and time, nonspecialized technical support, and lack of a formal process. This article presents the diffusion of innovations theory as a process for accomplishing a more formal integration of discipline-specific technologies into a marketing and business program. The use of “technology champions” is proposed as a means of enhancing the technology diffusion process.

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