Is Marketing Academia Losing Its Way?
A Guest Editorial written by David Reibstein, George Day, and Jerry Wind in the July 2009 issue poses the following question: Is Marketing Academic Losing Its Way? Introspective and critical reappraisals of academia usually produce healthy and useful outcomes. Quick examples include the 1987 book titled Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting by H. Thomas Johnson and Robert S. Kaplan and the May 2005 HBR article titled "How Business Schools Lost Their Way" by Warren G. Bennis and James O’Toole. The former stimulated a timely debate about the relevance of management accounting practices and needed reforms. The latter article fuelled a welcome and widespread discussion about contemporary business education. In that spirit, I hope this guest editorial provokes much needed discussion about our discipline.
The authors make two key points about inadequate progress on critical or strategic areas of inquiry within the marketing domain. First, marketing academia has been steadily shrinking, an issue they attribute to the “preemption of marketing frameworks, concepts, and methods by other fields of academic enquiry” such as the strategy field. As a consequence, the strategic domain has enhanced its appeal to general managers. Second, the marketing field lacks cohesion. That is, “the growing balkanization of academic marketing into quantitative modeling and consumer behavior has diminished research” on issues of strategic relevance to marketing practitioners.
The two preceding points may be related. If marketing fails to present a unified push as an academic discipline because of internal conflicts or externally perceived “balkanization,” it cannot grow into prominence as well as other disciplines can. To make progress, the authors recommend that promotion and tenure decisions in marketing academia should consider “contributions to the advancement of marketing practice.” This is a welcome and timely suggestion. It is reasonable to argue that marketing practice could also be advanced by bridging the gap between quantitative modeling and consumer behavior camps within the marketing discipline.
In other words, marketing academia needs a more integrative mind-set today. We need to think of ourselves as marketing experts rather than as modelers or as consumer behavior experts. Such thinking (and the willingness to embrace new perspectives) benefited our discipline in the past. Several talented individuals trained in psychology, sociology, or economics were attracted to marketing in past decades and helped our discipline grow rapidly. The heterogeneity in their academic background enriched the academic marketing discipline and imparted a strong and integrative identity.
Although by no means rigorous or scientific, the following point suggests that marketing academia needs to return to these roots. If we consider editorial board memberships at JCR, JMR, and Marketing Science as rough proxies, respectively, for expertise in the consumer behavior and quantitative modeling camps, and if JM editorial board membership broadly reflects research accomplishments of strategic consequence to marketing practitioners, there are only five marketing scholars with discipline-acknowledged expertise in all three areas. To become more relevant to marketing practitioners, marketing academia needs to celebrate the contributions of these marketing scholars and several others who have expertise in both consumer behavior and modeling camps. The discipline could benefit by showcasing accomplishments of well-rounded and integrative academic research in marketing. New AMA SIGs that promote the interface between consumer behavior and modeling camps (on teaching as well as research) are needed. The leading academic conferences in these two areas (i.e., ACR and Marketing Science) could promote such goals even more aggressively than they have in the past. Our doctoral students need more encouragement and training to be integrative thinkers rather than silo specialists. Finally, we need a new set of metrics to assess a marketing academic’s accomplishments in both camps.
As always, I welcome thoughtful comments from JM readers on the guest editorial in the July 2009 JM issue.
Siva K. Balasubramanian, Journal of Marketing Web site Editor
