Abstract
Since the advent of the Digital Era, marketing departments have been placing increasing reliance on information and technologies from rapidly developing fields such as neuroscience and artificial intelligence and on social media to develop their marketing strategies. However, marketing education has not kept pace with these changes. This article addresses the widening gap between marketing practice and marketing education. The authors suggest that the gap can be narrowed by adding three new topics to traditional marketing curricula, namely, (1) neuromarketing, (2) humanistic marketing and (3) artificial intelligence.

Introduction
Marketing science and education have always co-evolved with technological and social changes (Spais & Paul, 2021, p. 397). The current state of marketing theory is characterised by a heavy reliance on digital technologies, insights from other advanced fields like neuroscience and artificial intelligence, and social media (Huang & Rust, 2020). However, marketing education has fallen behind by not including some of the latest areas of knowledge in its curriculum. The purpose of this article is to address this shortfall. To this end, the authors discuss three topics that they believe should be included in marketing curricula. They are (1) neuromarketing, (2) humanistic marketing, and (3) artificial intelligence. The authors explain each topic and discuss some of their key implications for the practice of marketing. They conclude by illustrating how mastering these three topics would add to the repertoire of skills required by marketing students who are preparing themselves for today’s evolving job markets.

Marketing 5.0 and the need for a new curriculum
Marketing theory is going through its 5th generation. Marketing 5.0, known as marketing through technology for humanity (Kotler, Kartajaya, & Setiawan, 2021), extends previous generations where product-orientation (Marketing 1.0), consumer-orientation (Marketing 2.0), human-centrism (Marketing 3.0), and digital technology and social media (Marketing 4.0) defined marketing curricula. Marketing 5.0 has two distinct features: (1) unlike Marketing 4.0 where the emphasis was on basic digital technologies (Kotler, Kartajaya, & Setiawan, 2016), Marketing 5.0 focuses on more advanced technologies like big data analysis and artificial intelligence; and (2) it places special emphasis on a humanistic vision for marketing where values such as altruism, empathy, respect, trustworthiness, honesty, integrity, care, compassion, service, intelligence, beauty, and justice become the foundations of marketing theory, practice, and education (Kotler et al., 2021; Varey & Pirson, 2014). Marketing 5.0 necessities revolutionary changes to the way traditional marketing theory has been taught and practiced. Including the three emerging topics listed below can make marketing curricula more compatible with the vision of marketing 5.0.

Neuromarketing
1. Defining neuromarketing
The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines marketing as “an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders” (Grönroos, 2016, p. 397). Neuroscience helps marketers find better ways to create, communicate, and deliver value to stakeholders. It is a humanistic way of deciphering the complex world of consumer behaviour because it aims to understand emotions and feelings by studying their origins in the brain. The goal of neuromarketing is to adapt theories and methods from neuroscience and combine them with theories and methods from marketing and related disciplines, such as economics and psychology, to develop neuro-scientifically sound explanations of the impact of marketing on target customer behaviour (Lim, 2018).

Neuroscience uses a variety of techniques to decipher how our brain thinks, perceives, feels, and reacts to environmental stimuli. Figure 1 is a schematic illustration of the domain of techniques and tools used in neuroscience (Lim, 2018).


Figure 1: Domain of neuroscience for marketing (source: Lim, 2018).


2. Applications of neuromarketing: some recent examples
Electroencephalography (ECC) is an electromagnetic technique that records neural activities such as responses to emotive photos or messages inside the brain (Lim, 2018). It captures how online consumers react to graphic emoticons known as emojis, an important function since 92% of online shoppers use emojis as intuitive and informal ways of expressing their emotions and attitudes toward brands, products, and other marketing offers (Hsu & Chen, 2021). Consumers’ attention span is limited and is widely regarded as a key scarce resource for which marketers compete. Measuring how online users react to emojis reveals hidden information about their attitudes, mentalities, and perceptions, which can be then used in designing better marketing campaigns. Using ECC, Hsu and Chen (2021) found that placing emojis around an offering can have a significant influence on consumers’ hotel selections, which was demonstrated by their altered neural activities.

Another application of neuromarketing is discussed in a study by Stasi et al. (2018) that addressed the intriguing issue of consumers’ food choices. Decision-making about food benefits immensely from neuromarketing because it is often influenced by a complex set of emotions, feelings, attitudes, and values that are impossible to assess simply by asking consumers for their opinions (Stasi et al., 2018). Food marketers can utilise several technologies to explore how consumers make food choices. Some of the main neuromarketing tools used for this purpose are: (1) eye-tracking techniques to measure point-of-regard, eye movements, and visual attention; (2) Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) and ECC to measure the metabolic activity in the brain in response to food-related stimuli; (3) Skin Conductance (SC) detection to measure the activity of the skin's sweat glands, which are controlled by the sympathetic branch of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS); and (4) face-reading technologies to read and decipher facial expressions of consumers as indicators of their emotional state when they are exposed to a food/drink item. (See Stasi et al. (2018) for a comprehensive review of these neuromarketing techniques).

Humanistic marketing
1. Definition of humanistic marketing
Humanistic marketing stems from the paradigm of humanistic management (Kimakowitz, Pirson, Spitzeck, Dierksmeier, & Amann, 2011), according to which management theory and practice should advocate development of a global system for human dignity and well-being. Traditional marketing theory is based on the exchange paradigm from neo-classical theories of human beings. In this latter view, a human (e.g., a consumer) is a materialistic utility maximiser who values individual benefit over group and societal benefit - a ‘homo economicus’ who engages with others only in a transactional manner to promote his or her stable and predictable interests. He/she is amoral, values short-term gratification, and often acts opportunistically to further personal gain (Varey & Pirson, 2014). In this model, marketing is largely based on these limited and limiting assumptions and, in turn, is blamed for creating negative externalities such as unhealthy consumption patterns like smoking or overeating, and an increasingly consumerist and materialist society. This approach cherishes the “What I have” more than the “Who I am” and “What I do”, resulting in widespread instances of depression, harm to society and the environment, and increasing inequalities (Varey & Pirson, 2014). Humanistic marketing advocates a paradigm shift. It “re-humanises by retiring the modern marketing ideology of domination, exploitation, unfettered growth, and raising to the fore: quality, truth, intelligence, conversation, and conditional growth” (Varey & Pirson, 2014, p. 276).

2. Applications of a humanistic approach in marketing
Humanistic marketing is a new paradigm. However, its applications are wide and numerous. For instance, humanistic advertising focuses on clear messages that promote healthy, environmentally friendly, and cruelty-free products. It highlights the adverse effects of over-consumption and of materialistic and impulsive purchases, shows health ratings, and explains ingredients of products and their potential harms. Similarly, humanistic pricing strategies avoid unethical pricing practices, include stakeholder modelling, and dynamically adapt to consumers’ economic wellbeing. Humanistic product development differs from traditional product development strategies in at least three ways: 1) its focus on the physical and social wellbeing of consumers; 2) its objective of meeting previously unrecognized societal and environmental needs; and 3) its environmentally friendly treatment of design, production, and distribution. Humanistic marketing is also revolutionising market research by stressing more ethical and humanity-oriented research where the privacy, security, and dignity of consumers are important conditions of the research. All in all, marketing activities that rehumanise the previously dehumanised models of marketing are gaining momentum under this paradigm and are acting as liberating forces to change societies and markets toward a more sustainable future (Kotler et al., 2021).

Artificial intelligence in marketing
1. What is artificial intelligence?
One of the characteristics of Marketing 5.0 is its use of human-mimicking technologies like artificial intelligence (Kotler et al., 2021). Artificial intelligence (AI) is an overarching term for advanced technologies that make computers act like people (Huang & Rust, 2020). It is often treated as a subfield of business intelligence and includes subdomains such as machine learning, cognitive computing, and deep learning (De Bruyn, Viswanathan, Beh, Brock, & von Wangenheim, 2020; Sterne, 2017).

According to Sterne (2017), an AI-enabled system has three main capabilities: 1) detecting most predictive attributes in a large dataset; 2) deliberating on the most important sources of data and weighing different attributes to make recommendations or draw reliable conclusions; and 3) developing a self-corrective and self-learning system where each iteration increases the maturity of the system and reduces its errors. As such, AI has a broad range of applications in facial recognition, visual recognition, voice recognition, natural language processing, expert systems, affective computing, and robotics - each with enormous potential to revolutionise marketing.

To better understand how AI advances marketing, Huang and Rust (2020) proposed a three-stage framework (Figure 2) for strategic-marketing planning, incorporating multiple AI benefits: (1) mechanical AI for automating repetitive marketing functions and activities; (2) thinking AI for processing data to arrive at marketing decisions; and (3) feeling AI for analysing interactions and human emotions, particularly between an organisation and its customers.



Figure 2. Three types of artificial intelligence in marketing (Source: Huang & Rust, 2021).


2. Applications of AI in marketing
As noted by Huang and Rust (2020), applications of AI in marketing are on the rise due to increasing computing power, lower computing costs, the availability of big data from customers, suppliers, and other marketing stakeholders through social media, online sites, and tools like wearable devices, and the advance of machine-learning algorithms and models.

Marketers can apply three complementary types of AI. Mechanical AI is designed for automating repetitive and routine tasks like classification of customers, categorisation of product types in large distribution networks, and market segmentation. These applications accelerate execution of marketing strategies, speed up market research to develop new strategies, and enhance evaluation of planned marketing actions. Thinking AI is designed for processing data to arrive at new conclusions or decisions through methods such as text mining, speech recognition, voice recognition, and facial recognition. Marketers can use thinking AI to discover new needs, explore untapped market niches, formulate new offerings, and suggest new combinations of products and services. These benefits stem from the power of AI to identify previously unrecognised patterns in consumers’ data from social media, hearing devices like smart speakers, and mobile phones. Finally, feeling AI is designed to analyse human feelings and emotions via techniques like sentiment analysis, natural language processing (NLP), and embedded virtual agents. Marketers can use feeling AI to explore how consumers think about a brand, how they feel about changes in profit designs, how they react emotionally to a marketing campaign, and how they perceive changes to product distribution placement and endorsement by celebrities. As such, feeling AI enables marketers to mimic consumers’ emotions, to study them more accurately, and to utilise their learning in offering more appealing offerings.

Concluding remarks
Marketing creates and delivers value. The sources of value and the methods of creating it evolve with socio-cultural and technological advances, and so should models and methods of teaching marketing education. In this article the authors proposed three themes that are aligned with the vision of the new generation of marketing theory (i.e., Marketing 5.0). They believe that inclusion of these themes in marketing curricula will equip marketing graduates with important tools needed to meet new sociocultural and technological challenges.

References

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Biographies
Dr Zahra Sadeghinejad graduated with a PhD in management from Macquarie University. She is an active researcher and an award-winning lecturer. Her areas of teaching expertise include marketing, media management, entrepreneurship, and quantitative methods. Dr Sadeghi’s research has been published as book chapters and journal articles and has been presented at prestigious international conferences for which she has received multiple best-paper awards. Dr Sadeghi is currently a lecturer at the Universal Business School Sydney (UBSS), Central Queensland University (CQU), and the International College of Management Sydney (ICMS).



Dr Arash Najmaei holds a PhD in strategic management and entrepreneurship from Macquarie University. He is currently working full time as a marketing consultant and teaching part time at various universities. His teaching interests include business research methods, strategic management, entrepreneurship, organizational change, and media management. Dr Najmaei’s research has been published in several journals and research books and presented at international conferences. He has also received three best-paper awards for his research in entrepreneurship and research methods.