"My goal is to facilitate intellectually self-reliant students and prospective employees. That requires them to be able to think on their own."

-Mark Hill

Mark Hill of Marketing is discovering how people remember by examining memory through the lens of forgetting. He says that better retention is supposedly attributed to higher levels of intellect, but a good memory can sometimes be a detriment. "The ability to forgive," Hill said, "is attributed to forgetfulness. It's what allows us to let go."

Hill's study of memory has found a natural segue into his marketing research, consumer behavior and advertising classes, and is vital to his marketing pedagogy strategy. An advocate of teaching across the disciplines, Hill often engages his marketing students in discussions about philosophy, psychology, history, anthropology and cultural theory. His own career has crossed the disciplines as well. Hill came to Montclair State in the fall as a marketing specialist, but he began his career as an engineer.

Hill recently shared his research interests and teaching philosophy with INSIGHT Online, and described how he went from designing jet engines for the U.S. air force to teaching marketing.

Q. Tell us about your teaching philosophy.
A. I teach from a student-centered frame of reference. Each student population is different from university to university because culture, values and interests are different. As a professor, it is my responsibility to come to understand the nature of my students and to develop teaching strategies that are effective for them. My teaching method is a Socratic one. I attempt to draw questions out of my students, so in the process the questioning becomes more theirs than mine. I try to get my students to think, question and practice as marketers. My goal is to facilitate intellectually self-reliant students and prospective employees. That requires them to be able to think on their own.

Q. How did you go from designing jet engines to teaching marketing?
A. I started out in engineering, working in a top-secret environment for General Electric in Cincinnati, designing jet engines for the air force's advanced technical fighters of the 1990s. After that I wanted to move into technical marketing, but because my technical background was so strong, companies interviewing me for marketing positions offered me senior technical engineering positions. That's when I decided to specialize in marketing strategy.

Q. Tell us about your research on memory and decision-making.
A. I'm challenging the traditional view that memory is retention. My research questions our ability to retain information and, at a later date, have access to and retrieve it. I'm looking at memory from a forgetting perspective because we construct a past to serve purposes of the present. Supporting evidence in an eyewitness testimony, for instance, is not necessarily valid because lawyers can manipulate witnesses with questions.

Q. How do you apply this to marketing?
A. I initially looked at the understanding of memory from various theories in terms of how to design more memorable ads. I questioned how consumers have certain memories available and how they block out others when they make decisions. The idea here is to shift the perspective in terms of consumer behavior from memory attention to strategies that involve forgetting. Nostalgia-type advertisements bring the past back into the present when marketers recreate the old into the new. You're not really reliving the past, it's a re-creation serving the purposes of the present. Marketers who are refashioning images or music are employing strategies of forgetting. People are not reliving the experience; a new one is being created.

Q. You've also done research on casual dress in the work environment. Tell us about that.
A. I did research in the '90s that dealt with the emergence of casual dress in the workplace that started in the late '80s. Businesses and organizations were looking for low-cost and no-cost benefits to offer their employees as a way to boost moral. What they didn't anticipate were the implications associated with casual dress. People have different standards of casual dress, which led to internal friction between management and employees. A lot of businesses began asking organizations like Levi Strauss, which promoted casual dress, if other companies were dealing with similar problems. I helped Levi Strauss develop a method to help them identify the various discourses about casual dress. We were able to identify the pros and cons of casual dress and where the tensions lied.

Q. Where is the trend headed?
A. Businesses are going back toward traditional dress because companies have found that casual dress is more problematic than beneficial. Also, as a business becomes more concerned about being competitive in the marketplace, that casualness could lead to areas where there are tendencies to become too loose, and therefore not a close-knit organization.

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