This article examines how we can encourage students to engage critically with marketing ideas and activities. Critical marketing studies are currently on the margins of the discipline, and the ideas and challenges to conventional marketing studies posed by critical scholars are rarely tested or implemented in the marketing classroom. Often these are perceived as too academic and elitist to be relevant to the modern business environment. Drawing largely from debates in the management education literature, this article discusses the problems and possibilities of introducing critical reflection into the marketing curriculum and describes some strategies for encouraging critique in the marketing classroom.

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is a lecturer in marketing at the University of Ulster in Londonderry. Her research interests lie in the areas of feminist perspectives and gender issues in marketing and consumer behaviour, experiential consumption, consumer culture and media consumption, particularly women's magazines and advertising. She is particularly interested in interpretive approaches to consumer research, including reader-response theory, feminist literary theory and critical approaches generally. Her primary research areas are consumer behaviour and advertising. Pauline Maclaranis Professor of Marketing at De Montfort University in Leicester. Her research has two main strands: gender issues in marketing and consumer behaviour, and the experiential dimensions of contemporary consumption, particularly in relation to utopia and the festival marketplace. Much of this work draws on the tools and techniques of literary theory in order to gain insights into the symbolic aspects of consumer behaviour. Pauline is an editor-in-chief of Marketing Theory. AbstractThis paper focuses on the consumer imagination and, more specifically, on the imaginary shopping spaces which women's magazines create. It addresses the anticipatory, imaginary and experiential consumption which this medium invites. The paper explores how women's magazines function as 'dreamworlds' of shopping; and how contemporary readers consume these imaginary shopping spaces. In order to illustrate what the authors term the 'shopping imaginary', they draw on findings from a study of women's experiential consumption of magazines, which show the multifaceted ways around which imaginary consumption is explored and enjoyed by women. The study suggests that women's magazines, like department stores, are spaces that facilitate and celebrate just looking and browsing, and, above all, they are shopping spaces that address the power of the imagination within them.

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