EMAC’s executive board initiated a project to develop a portal that is intended to help EMAC members to exchange ideas and material for teaching and research. The board has asked Manfred Krafft, Professor of Marketing at the University of Münster in Germany, to set up such an electronic portal. The official launch of EMAC’s teaching portal happened at the 2005 EMAC conference in Milan. The website’s URL is http://www.emac-teaching-portal.org or http://www.emacteachingportal.org.

The idea of the portal, whose development has been initiated by EMAC, is to improve the intensity and frequency of interaction among marketing academics even in between our annual EMAC conferences. The English portal can be accessed at the URLs www.emac-teaching-portal.org or www.emac-teaching-portal.org. The portal offers downloads of lecture material such as articles, case studies, working paper, statistics, and a lot more for all major marketing topics. EMAC members can also offer their material for upload. After an evaluation and aceeptance by the responsible area editor, the material is accessible for all EMAC members. Available material can also be reviewed online and non-anonymous by EMAC members. Furthermore, a forum has been included to allow general and sub-area related discussions.

All users are arranged into three groups: non-members, members and editors. Non-members are invited to surf through the website, read headlines and brief summaries of all the material available and to get general information about EMAC. Such the new portal can serve as an “appetizer” for non-members to learn more about EMAC. Members can access the site by log-in with their regular EMAC password. EMAC members can access the whole material, the upload function, review function and the forum. Each sub-area editor is responsible for one major marketing topic and is responsible for all area-related material of the portal. The area editor takes also care of the revision of the uploaded material which is the final step of the publishing process at EMAC’s teaching portal. Although some of the topics are already covered by area editors, Manfred Krafft as the editor-in-chief of the portal invites all of you to contact him (mkrafft@uni-muenster.de) and to volunteer for the remaining topics.

The portal has been developed by Manfred Krafft, professor of Marketing and director of the Institute of Marketing at the University of Münster in Germany. Two computer science student assistants supported him in the development of the site. In May 2005, all basic functions of the portal will be implemented and run. However, the team is aiming to extend and improve the functionality of the website constantly. Therefore, any suggestions and concerns raised by you are very much welcome and should be mailed directly to Manfred. Until now, the development costs could be kept very low and the team is confident to collect enough resources that are needed to maintain the portal by sponsors. Sponsorships include banner ads on the portal. Thus, the portal also helps to make companies such as publishers or market research organizations even more aware of EMAC.

So far the report about the status. We requested material from the last years’ EMAC conferences and have received material from Murcia, Braga and Glasgow so far. Gilles Laurent and Lutz Hildebrandt sent out a request for people who could probably serve as area editors or contact persons for country-related material. Most of the names we got were rather good for language-related material. However, we want to begin with an organization of all material by topic / sub-area. We invested most of our time in getting the portal running and launched. As you can see, two URLs have been reserved, and some of the work-in-progress papers presented at former EMAC conference proceedings have already been integrated into the portal. You also asked for a short plan for the next 2 to 3 years and for responses to the issues raised in one of your more recent e-mails. Here are my replies to the issues you raised:

1. Tasks of area editors / national correspondents: As already mentioned, finding active supporters of the portal, i.e. area editors, is our primary task. We are confident that we can fill most of the positions for sub-areas (topics) within the next 3 months. Until that point, we will put in material from EMAC proceedings. Finding national correspondents is our second step and should be finished by the end of 2005.
2. Promoting the portal: Above you find my draft for an article in EMAC’s chronicle that should help to make the new website known to EMAC members. We will also send this information to our country representatives and ask them to promote the new website among the national EMAC members, e.g. on regional or national meetings of marketing faculty members. I will also present the portal in Milan in a session of 90 minutes on May 25, 2005. The most important effect should be a kind of reinforcement when sub-area editors actively target marketing scientists that are requested to upload additional material and to use the topic-related website for teaching material (community building).
3. A “guided tour” is rather complex to be programmed. Therefore, we will offer a “how to use the teaching portal” document that will be available on the website for download within the next days.
4. The “how to use” document will be adapted to special needs of sub-area editors and potential contributors.
5. The “copyright” and “property rights” issues are yet unsolved. We will insert a note that EMAC and my team exclude any liabilities etc. (we simply copy what we find on similar websites such as the one by AMA). However, we have to investigate this further. Does EMAC / EIASM have a lawyer that we could contact to clarify this and related issues? Otherwise, I would ask one of the publishers interested in sponsoring the website to help us with legal advice.
6. AMA’s marketing power website offers material and information for academic members (see, in particular, the Academic Resource Center). However, our initiative covers more material, uses a set of editors for voluntary support of this idea, and aims at a higher intellectual level. We will continue to observe AMA’s activities, but we also believe that AMA will not be able to match the quality and quantity of our material. Nevertheless, we will get and try to stay in touch with Charles Hofacker who is the current editor of AMA’s Academic Resource Center.
7. To find interesting material or to identify colleagues who work in specific fields will be the primary task of all sub-area editors. My task as the editor-in-chief is to supervise this process (frequency of uploads and downloads, “speed”/”slowness” of evaluation processes of new material by individual area editors, quality of material by topic). It would be great if EMAC’s president could send out an e-mail to all members to ask for their input. This e-mail could also be used to promote the new portal as the most valuable source of information for teaching purposes.
8. A prize for the best contribution (material) is a nice idea. However, I would reserve this for the second year. We also have to find ways to make it more interesting to become a member of the “editorial board” of our new portal.
9. Publishers will be one of our primary sources for funding. They could also help to promote our website by refering to EMAC’s teaching portal on their websites, in particular on sites related to marketing textbooks / readers.

Our plans for next steps are as follows:

• Adding material from EMAC conferences to the website. This means that about 3.000 abstracts or working papers have to be added. In other words, a lot of resources (student assistants) has to be devoted to this task. Deadline: End of August.
• Identifying subarea editors. Ed Malthouse (Northwestern University) already agreed to cover the topic of Direct Marketing. Finished by the end of September.
• Updating the list of sub-areas (topics). Channel Management, Retail Management, and Service Management have been added, Public Relations has been deleted.
• Updating the portfolio of services. A list of experts in the respective fields will be built by sub-area editors. We hope that this new service will help to get scientists from different countries more easily in touch.
• Bulding a network of country representatives. After all positions of sub-area editors have been filled, we will try to motivate colleagues to support us with country-specific material, in particular with non-English material. My suggestion is to start with large countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK). After a year of experience, we could extend this initiative to other countries. We expect to have substantial, country-specific material for these 5 countries within a year from now, i.e. by June 2006.
• Finding sponsors. I have had talks with people from GfK, TNS, Pearson, and Springer. The all showed deep interest in EMAC’s initiative. I plan to talk to other publishers and to the European Case Clearing House (ECCH). The idea is to get enough funds to cover the annual cost of running the portal. We could also earn money by using affiliate programs such as amazon’s concept (if people order books they found on the portal, EMAC would earn a commission). However, such money has to be taxed. Therefore, to me, getting sponsorships seems to be the best source of funding.