A structural model of the drivers of online education is proposed and tested. The findings help to identify the interrelated nature of the lectures delivered via technology outside of the traditional classroom, the importance of mentoring, the need to develop course structure, the changing roles for instructors and students, and the importance of designing and delivering course content on the enhancement of the online learning experience. The results support an integrated, building-block approach for developing successful online programs and courses.

Online education has created a “virtual community” learning environment. Effective assessment of this new learning environment is paramount to providing quality education and may provide insights to effective management of virtual communities in the business world. A model of online education effectiveness is proposed and then empirically investigated. Dimensions included in this model are student-to-student interactions, student-to-instructor interactions, instructor support and mentoring, information delivery technology, course content, and course structure. Measures of these dimensions were then analyzed and found to be significant predictors of the variance in students’ evaluations of the global effectiveness of the online educational experience.

The interactivity of the new electronic media requires that a database-driven segmentation approach to communication strategy be employed to take advantage of its uniqueness. To accomplish this, firms must develop ways of collecting information at the individual level by traditional and/or electronic means, and of using that data to create informationintensive customer communication strategies. These strategies should then employ the new media to generate interaction with customers. We term this approach 'Interactive IMC'. In this article we propose and illustrate an interactive IMC process model.

Customer relationship management (CRM) technology provides a strategic opportunity to better understand customers. Virtually unexplored is research targeting CRM adoption by small businesses. This exploratory study investigates the factors that influence the adoption of CRM technology by small entrepreneurial retail firms. A key premise is that `entrepreneurial' retail store owners can be differentiated from `owner-managers' through their adoption of CRM. A preliminary model is developed and tested through a sample of 386 small hardware retailers responding to a mail questionnaire. The findings show that CRM adopters had higher product class knowledge, a greater risk orientation, saw a stronger relative advantage, perceived higher environmental complexity and hostility, and had a more open business change orientation.

The Journal of Marketing Education (JME) was launched almost 35 years ago. In this invited article, we review JME's long and distinguished history. For historical perspective, we will lean heavily on the words of JME editors (including special issue editors); this focus adds context for the past and helps project the future. As a descriptive tool, we highlight key trends as they emerged over the years, and we offer a categorization rubric for simplifying cross-era comparisons. We also spotlight the most active authors over the years, note JME outstanding articles of the year, and highlight the most frequently cited articles. In presenting this historical review, we first discuss the methodology used for creating categorical areas and then present the findings for each of the four eras. We then provide an overview of each area and cross-era trend assessment. And finally, we conclude with future research directions. Keywords course content, marketing education issues, methodology, marketing careers/advising, skills/traits development in marketing education, education administration issues, learning approaches and issues, experiential learning techniques, ethics, technology in classroom, principles of marketing