ABSTRACT
Nowhere does this anti-intellectual ethos of career-oriented customer orientation take root more strongly than in a business school. And-ironically in the extreme-nowhere do we find a devotion to customer orientation in the academic community voiced more vociferously or with more sanctimonious subservience to the student as customer than among those very marketing professors whose allegiance to student satisfaction runs in a direction diametrically opposed to the more soundly conceived principles of effective marketing strategy that they teach in the classroom. As one appalling example, consider the widespread adoption of required core courses in marketing offered to students grouped into clusters that take all their classes together. Such a system maximizes the student satisfaction that stems from incessantly networking with one’s classmates. But, by necessitating the standardization of course offerings across sections, it runs directly counter to every known principle of market segmentation. Professors unlucky enough to teach such a course find themselves producing a standardized mass-marketed commodity that paradoxically embodies the often-lamented majority fallacy-that is, the demonstrably false premise that a single offering can please everybody or, in other words, the single greatest marketing error that it is possible to commit.
