The Winter Educators' Conference is an important forum for current research and intellectual exchange. Manuscripts and special session proposals are invited that present evidence of empirical regularities, explore new theoretical perspectives, suggest practical implications of existing theory, apply new tools to marketing management, provide insights for research drawn from marketing practice and consumer behavior, highlight advances in marketing practice, and/or insightfully synthesize one or more important bodies of literature relevant to marketing.

Although the conference is open to special sessions and paper proposals on all marketing-related topics, a goal for the 2008 Winter Educators' Conference is to seek conceptual or empirical work that incorporates organizational-level issues related to the conference theme of "Marketing the Organization and its Products and Services." We plan to place special emphasis on special sessions and strongly encourage potential participants to organize and propose such sessions with research colleagues working in similar research domains. Special sessions might take the form of (a) traditional research presentations (3-4) with a discussant; or (b) interactive panel discussions with 4-6 panelists and a moderator. Other types of creative special sessions are also possible.

Another goal of the conference is to serve as a professional development opportunity for Marketing scholars that is consistent with the conference theme. This will be accomplished by creating a forum for developing research partnerships and interacting with other attendees from both academic and practitioner realms.