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Great editorial ..... as a wanderer between the worlds of academia and business I can only agree to the three authors. The two disciplines are falling apart quickly. What I found interesting is that the topic "Blue Ocean Strategy" (this is the Chan Kim book) was taken off a corporate executive program of my company at INSEAD (although Chan Kim is teaching there) because it was supposed to miss academic rigor.
My main concern is that - if this gap is widening - it MUST have an effect on corporate executive programs at major business schools. I am not sure what the effect is currently but I bet that corporations keep their execs away now pretending that times are tough. In reality, I fear, it is because they are beginning to realize that the practical value of this investment is dwindling. I hope I am wrong ......

I've been carrying the article in question around with me for the last week or two. I think the professors' remarks are timely and relevant, the more so because I'm about to take my comprehensive exams.

To me, the "contribution to practice" issue is paramount. I originally got my MBA because I wanted to be a better practitioner, so I can see the argument that high-quality classroom instruction constitutes contribution to practice. It does, no question.

However, when I decided to get my DBA, I began to find -- as I learned how to read journal articles -- a wealth of additional information and insight that could benefit practitioners, if only the practitioners knew they were there (and could penetrate the language).

Contribution to practice matters. Whether we, as marketing (or any other kind of) academics, work in public or private educational institutions, we get to do (what we do because somebody sold something. It is a matter of self-interest as well as obligation to see that we help someone keep selling something, and do it better.

I agree with a lot of what is said here. As we all head to AMA to sit in little rooms for three days interviewing job candidates, here are some relevant things I think about in the hiring process. (These are my opinions and do not necessarily represent the opinions of my colleagues or Northeastern University in general):

(1) I like to see a job candidate with some substantial work experience and/or an MBA. I think it makes students much more likely to understand the whole picture of business and business education.

(2) If managerial implications of a student's research are not obvious, we usually ask about them in interviews ("what would a manager learn from your research?"). If a student can't answer that question, it's a very bad sign.

(3) Practitioner journals count as publications at our place. Sloan, California, and Harvard, of course, but even Marketing Management and Marketing Research (the AMA practitioner journals) are on our long list of acceptable outlets (disclosure: I'm on MM's editorial board). You can't have a whole dossier of these, but we consider having one or two practitioner publications a plus in a tenure and promotion candidate.

As a caution, I'll note generalism is not a good strategy for assistant professors in the current incentive system. As a colleague of mine put it years ago, you have to demonstrate your specialist expertise enough to get tenure: then you can do all the cross-disciplinary strategy and field research you like!

Bruce Clark
Northeastern University

Not again about marketing losing its roots! We've been at this now for over 40 years every since Kotler and his all exchange is marketing view. Yes, we have lost our ways. How can academics become more relevant to the real world of marketing when few modern academics actually know how marketing works in the economy or the firm? A very high % of academics have never worked outside their ivory tower. They are idiot savants when it comes to what marketing is all about. The micro focus rather the broader dimensions of marketing has been largely responsible for this narrowing view of our discipline. Few academics read trade journals because they are not scientific. Even fewer attend trade conferences. Some academics even consider the world of business and marketing with disdain! Our very own AMA has fewer and fewer members from the real world of business.
I could go on and on

I just left a P&T meeting angry at the chair for including a statment in the recommendation letter that the candidate taught a "difficult" subject, quant (i.e. stats). I didn't see why teaching stats is more difficult than teaching any other course, but the point was clear: such a statement would never be made for someone teaching marketing courses. While I had immediate success to get the clause removed from the letter, I realized that it would be a longer process to change the attitudes of colleagues in other disciplines that teaching marketing is somehow "easy" or somehow less rigorous than teaching other disciplines (for example I heard a similar statment made about how hard it is to teach tax accounting, though this was not made in a P&T meeting). How hard can that be, it's a few processes and rules?

The internal attitude towards marketing has continued to bother me, but I never really considered that this might be a good place to start: marketing our discipline within the colleges of business.

Perhaps I am dense, but it was never clear to me until I came across the following simple statement earlier this year in the "Pharmasim" instructors manual (p. 34): "Marketing is hard. (After all, if it were easy, wouldn't firms be better at it?)"

As I thought about making this statement to the class, I began to realize that Marketing is the most difficult discipline in business.

To be a well-rounded marketer, we have to know accounting (does accounting need to know marketing?), human resource management, operations, behavioral economics and human behavior, finance, strategy, stats, and a host of non-business related disciplines as well.

So, perhaps we are "losing our way" not because we are going in the wrong direction, but that we have too many directions to follow. Dave R. and company are right in that business strategy has usurped our critical marketing strategy elements, somehow relegating marketing strategy as subservient, when, in fact, everything in the firm has to be in synch with the marketing strategy--it's central to the firm.

So, my starting point is to find a way to market the fact that "marketing is the hardest discipline." If I can find success here, teaching this to future executives will bear long term fruit.

Tom Gruen
University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

More like lost its way. The young people that have been coming out of college are clueless drones. They've no idea what innovative or unique mean. I'm not sure where these professors are getting their knowledge (maybe agency rejects?). I guess its part-in-parcel with university's as a whole - complete and total decimation of teaching and learning.

Dear All,

It is with great interest that I read this post and the comments that follow. I also think marketing academia has lost its way, and think it is largely a factor of the system within which the cycle self-perpetuates:

For example:
- Doctoral candidates without industry experience or practical context of application in their research projects
- Recuritment of academics without any industry experience or engagement with business. In many cases this is not even a selection criteria
- Academic career progression fostered mainly on 'rigiour' and publication (i.e., not relevance or engagement)
- UG schemes that do not build practical/contextual skills in marketing graduates through internships/work placements.

Having worked in both industry (market Research) and academia (last 7-10 years) I am continually disappointed that marketing academia doesn't especially reward 'relevance' in research and 'engagement' in the dissemination of that research, in the same way as it does 'rigiour' in the conduct of that research and the elite silo approach by which we dissemination that knowledge (e.g., to academia only).

Marketing as an academic discipline and core business function/process is not all about 'consumer behaviour' or 'modelling'. It is about so much more than that, and especially with evolving digital media - marketing and how it is conducted, researched or exists in society is fundamentally changing.

With this we too, in marketing academia need to evolve!

Perhaps a key point for discussion - be it at AMA or similar forums, is how can WE marketing academia both REWARD and REMAIN RELEVANT in RESEARCH & IT'S DISSEMINATION in a fast changing world of Marketing.

Smiles
Kelly

The authors note that there has been inadequate progress in the field of Marketing. To substantiate their point, they take the aid of a couple of general platitudes
• Authors lament the preemption of marketing frameworks by other fields such as strategy.
o We believe that this phenomenon is a mere evolution of marketing into a monolithic entity that encapsulates other fields of studies
 Ex: Biology of human cells derives its energy from molecular studies of chemistry which in turn derives its energy from the study of atomic forces of physics, which eventually resides on mathematical foundations. Through out this nexus, no one field of study is superior, none inferior, without the synergistic possibilities evolution of fields (or progress) is impossible. The authors’ lamenting on the fundamentals of human progress is questionable.

• The growing balkanization of academic marketing into quantitative modeling and consumer behavior has diminished research on issues of strategic relevance to marketing practitioners.
o This is merely a finding, and the authors have exploded the mere finding into ridiculously extravagant proportions
 Ex: Einstein developed his ‘General Theory of Relativity’ in the form of equations (mathematics) first. He later extrapolated these equations into space time framework and found something that puzzles even the brightest of scientists today (after ninety years). The paradigm shift in science would never have happened, if Einstein secretly rambled as the authors of this article are publicly doing.
 Since then (1915), scientists have theorized eloquently and proposed ambitious projects based on their theories. The LHC at CERN, Geneva is the might example of our times.
 So, there are always paradigm shifts (that are primed by fundamentals/quantitative modeling) in any field of study, followed by a period of dormancy ( primed by theories). This has been the way science/ arts/literature worked throughout the history. It is merely natural. And, hence the authors’ whimper is merely a finding.

I believe that it not entirely just to believe that the strategic aspect is being missed out when the academia focuses on detailed subjects like consumer behavior and quantitative aspects. In the practical world, it might get difficult for so many teams to work together with so many differentiated functions, but then in today’s world of super-specialty, we cannot burden a person with so many responsibilities that it gets difficult to handle and hence this division is necessary. It is possible that the academia are missing out on the strategic and holistic business aspect, but then a person is bound to learn those aspects with experience and not out of books and teachers.

The article states that the gap between interests, standards and priorities of academic marketers and marketing executives operating in real world has increased, its becoming damaging for the overall benefits of both the parties. What is expected out of academic marketers is not just to formulate tools and methods but also to leave impact on the marketing practice.
Diagnosing this divergence author says that today the domain of academic marketing is shrinking, the researches are useful only for further researches and not for decision making, this is happening because of overlapping of functional areas and lack of progress made by marketers in crucial areas.
I don’t agree with authors comment that MBA’s these days have parochial analysis approach and they do not use the classroom knowledge and put it in practical use. In fact nowadays MBA’s are making use of lot of research papers and putting theory and models into practice, also marketing is no more restricted to research it covers a whole lot of gamut of activities. It has even gone to the extent to studying consumer behavior and their psychology that what makes them buy what and accordingly pitching your product. MBA’s fresh out of college wants to put the maximum of theoretical knowledge they have in use and when they face the real world they are able to relate both theory and practice together.
Author also states that researchers don’t consider the marketers pain points while doing the research which is not true as the companies mostly do their researches as per their needs only and expect positive results from the research. Marketing academia is already working on relevant issues and the concepts given by researchers like BCG matrix, GE matrix, Porters Five Forces models are some concepts that hold good even today in every sphere of business.
No doubt it is responsibility of both academia and marketers to work in collaboration for institutional benefits but they are already working in sync with each other.

Ritu mishra roll no 9366, Reema Verma 9440
Great lakes Institute Of Management

The authors have hit the nail on the head when they talk about the balkanization of marketing research into quantitative modeling & CB. Most research these days have become very narrow in scope in terms of content & issues that are being dealt with. Consumer behavior is not the end all of marketing as can be witnessed by, e.g., Bitner 1990; Taylor 1994; Maxham and Netemeyer, though comprehensive works on CB, all of them sign off with the limitation that consumers can only be understood to a certain extent from a pure academic point of view and to gain further insights one must look at it in coalition with the people who are out there in the trenches dealing with them on a daily basis.
They do have a great point when they talk about the limited work done on New Media by marketers. The excuse for this often being that it is a medium that is not as widely understood by most, which is kind of silly because with the advent of Web 2.0, consumer buying and spending patterns have changed almost overnight and this is all the more reason for them to get with the programme and do more comprehensive work on this.
Changing the incentives for further research is another valid point by the authors. Because if tenure is ensured just by getting an article on marketing published, then there really is no incentive for practicality in studies.
But we are not sure how much tempting people with work experience to this field is going to help as they might bring in a working knowledge to the research but they would also bring in biases from whichever field that they’ve come from to the study and objectivity might be lost.
In terms of addressing the 4 main points that the authors have pointed out, I feel that focused research can contribute a lot especially in how to help banks regain consumer trust, which will be a major concern in marketing in the coming year or so.
In conclusion we feel that the article addresses a growing concern especially in some academic circles and we do agree that some corrective action must be taken on this front. Marketers and academics should work more in tandem to get better results out of their studies and to make it more effective.