Merriam-Webster defines education as “the action or process of teaching someone in a school, college or university” and “the knowledge, skill and understanding that you get from attending a school, college, or university.”¹ The first definition conceptualizes education as a process and a set of activities, whereas the second views it as an outcome generated for the recipient. Pertinent to marketing, we define education as “a set of activities, institutions, and processes for exchanging offerings that include but are not limited to pedagogical content, knowledge, and ideas that provide value for its consumers, stakeholders, and society.” In terms of processes and activities, education encompasses instruction, teaching, tutoring, schooling, training, guiding, and coaching. In terms of outcomes, we include proximal outcomes such as learning, increased knowledge and insight, and belief change as well as longer-term outcomes such as knowledge accumulation, behavior change, employment, and income.

 

Many other aspects of education should be considered as well. In terms of actors, education may include work performed by teachers, professors, tutors, academicians, and coaches as well as work supported by staff and administration. Avenues through which education occurs may include traditional schools and colleges, academies led by private for-pay tutors and providers, and numerous online and digital platforms ranging from self-teaching videos to courses with (a)synchronous delivery. Commercially, education can range from being fully government funded to fully privately paid, financed by nonprofit institutions, and any combination of these. Although education is traditionally associated with public and private K–12 schools, colleges, and universities, it goes well beyond these institutions. Education also includes household-based and peer networks (at-home schooling), private companies that offer courses (e.g., Coursera, Udemy, EdX), public campaigns (Screen for Life campaign to educate about colorectal cancer), and self-learning and tutoring (e.g., Khan Academy, LinkedIn Learning), to mention a few. Finally, there is a need to consider many activities whose primary focus is not education but may fall within the scope of education; these include advertising and communication campaigns targeted at specific audiences, training seminars, coaching, recreational learning (e.g., painting, cooking, sports), and so forth.

 

This inclusive and expansive definition and scope of education is reflected in the content of this special issue, Although we discuss individual articles in detail subsequently, we draw attention to the fact that the content of this special issue spans a wide variety of educational avenues including K–12 education (Sen and Tucker 2022; Zhou, Gill, and Liu 2022), university education (Krishna and Orhun 2022), online education (Lu, Bradlow, and Hutchinson 2022; Narang, Yadav, and Rindfleisch 2022), and sales training (Singh, Sen, and Borle 2022). The content of this special issue also examines many different actors including students (Narang, Yadav, and Rindfleisch 2022), salespeople (Singh, Sen, and Borle 2022), curriculum development departments (Sen and Tucker 2022), grocery shoppers (Bollinger et al. 2022), school administrators (Dolbec et al. 2022), home tutors (Kim et al. 2022), and buyers of educational products and services (Tu, Kwon, and Gao 2022). Consistent with our definition, this special issues touches on pedagogical content (Krishna and Orhun 2022; Sen and Tucker 2022), the process of gaining and imparting knowledge (Lu, Bradlow, and Hutchinson 2022; Narang, Yadav, and Rindfleisch 2022), and educational outcomes (Bollinger et al. 2022; Goli, Chintagunta, and Sriram 2022; Singh, Sen, and Borle 2022).