Marketing professors: paths and perspectives

Purpose – The objective of this paper is to study how marketing professors see their job. How they assess their career paths, the reasons, and motivations underlying their professional choice, their points of view on the practices they employ, and their problems and difficulties, as well as the solutions they have found during the course of their professional development. Design/methodology/approach – This study is exploratory and qualitative. Grounded theory technique was employed to collect and analyse the data. Findings – There is a substantial diversity of professional paths and a quest for satisfaction and pleasure associated with the relative freedom and lower stress of the teaching profession, as compared to executive life. Research limitations/implications – The exploratory and non‐conclusive nature hinder the findings to be generalised and the wideness of the problem making the analysis broad but not deep. Practical implications – Understand marketing professors and raise some ideas about how to improve teaching performance. Originality/value – The work should be of interest to academics, professors and educational organizations seeking to improve marketing teaching and learning.