THE USEFULNESS OF ACADEMIC WORK ON MARKETING
It is idiotic and unprofessional for marketers, in any discipline, to dismiss or ignore the work of academics. Many of their studies are thorough, relevant, applicable, and practical. Their prime contribution for the practitioner is their ability to spot trends, validate them, and crystallize their observations into general principles, concepts, and tools. Their work has saved many businesses the cost of introducing half baked schemes or mindlessly adopting the latest fad from the latest guru.
If a professional is about to test a new concept (like, say, CEM or viral marketing) and then set about building it into their organization’s processes, it is surely important to know that it hasn’t just been made up by a loudmouth with something to sell (even if that loudmouth is a member of a respected consultancy firm). If there are well calibrated research projects comprising a hundred, two hundred, or thousands of people, testing a tool that is about to be used, it is sensible to understand some of their implications.
There are problems though:
(i) Sloppiness
It is apparent that some concepts taught today have become distorted through time. One disgraceful example is the simplistic representation of Ansoff’s work and the continual reference to his diagram in a 1957 article where it does not actually appear. For the work of a PhD mathematician and respected corporate strategy professor to be so diluted is very poor. It shuts practising marketers out of high level debates about diversification, M&A, and disposal. Another is AIDA. This concept was made up by a marketing consultant around 1889 and is still taught today due to undue fame. The fact that many texts cite the source as a 1925 psychology article, which was debunking it, is very sloppy. It is apparent that some writers simply have not read the sources they quote. Such sloppiness is unacceptable to people who actually try to use these techniques. It damages businesses.
(ii) Bias
There are a number of biases, it seems, in the canon of marketing knowledge. For instance, much of it originates from consumer product marketing in the United States of America during the mid 20th century and much has changed since then. The world’s economies are more service dominated and there is greater need for international marketing. Much of modern practice has its heart in very different cultures (like China, India, or Japan). So, the cultural bias in many of the models and concepts needs to be understood and allowed for.
(iii) Lack of an overarching theoretical perspective
In many of the sciences there is a growing body of knowledge against which new hypotheses are tested. Yet despite early attempts to create a “theory of marketing”, there is no credible unifying theme in our field. Like the elephant in the poem, each explores an aspect of the entity and presents an incomplete picture. Whether there will be such a universal perspective on marketing in the foreseeable future is impossible to predict but, until then, practising marketers are left to judge whether one particular concept or tool is applicable in each situation. It’s part of the job.
(iv) Isolation of work and concepts
The world-wide marketing landscape seems like a stage lit by a number of limited, precise spotlights. Researchers do cooperate, discuss, and conference. For a practitioner, though, it is very difficult to access excellent valuable, inter-connected concepts.
(v) Lack of rigorous historical context and research
It is exceptionally helpful to learn how enduring techniques have been deployed down the decades and to understand which have been forged by experience. The advent of marketing historians and conferences like the annual CHARM gatherings provide valuable insight to practising marketers. They identify long-term trends and enduring (i.e. non-faddish) practices. They are, though, too few and hard for practitioners to access.
Professor Evert Gummerson is one of the most critical (see Gummerson, E., 2003 and his article in Baker, M J. and Hart, S., 2008). He has suggested that the textbook presentations of marketing are based on limited real world data. He also pointed out that “goods” account for a minor part of all marketing but the textbook presentations are focused on them while services are treated as a special case. He reported that marketing to consumers dominates text books; that business-to-business marketing is treated as a special case, rather than a routine and well developed aspect of the discipline. Most alarmingly he says that the textbook presentations are a patchwork; new knowledge is piled on top of existing knowledge but not integrated with it. They have a clever pedagogical design; the form is better than the content.
Professor Malcolm McDonald speculated about the effect of poor teaching on the actual use of practical concepts. He said: “The DPM can easily be misused and misunderstood, in spite of the technique being described in most marketing texts and taught on courses. The fault appears to lie more with those responsible for writing about and teaching the subject than with those who try to use it. Similar problems caused the somewhat simpler Boston Consulting Matrix to fall into misuse” (McDonald, M.H.B., 1993).
Whereas Professor Paul Fifield thinks the attempt to squeeze marketing into a consistent “scientific” theory is the problem: “The main reason for this apparent confusion is the writers’ attempts to try and force every possible situation into a generalized blueprint concept. Marketing is littered with attempts to force theories out of observed good practice and thus make the teacher’s and the consultant’s job that much easier. We should once and for all accept that this scientific approach just doesn’t work in areas like marketing. Marketing success depends on consumer acceptance and this is just not predictable in any scientific sense within scientific limits of accuracy” (Fifield, 1992).
Professor David Carson of the University of Ulster pointed out the disparity between the academic view of marketing and the professionals in the field. He said (in correspondence about this book) that academics assert that it is important to:
(i) carry out a situation analysis;
(ii) do a SWOT analysis;
(iii) present findings and recommendations which are invariably a radical change such as introducing new products or entering new markets.
Professor Carson contrasts this with the reality in marketing departments. Based on his research they:
(i) don’t advocate radical change;
(ii) don’t change the product (immediately);
(iii) look for solutions within the firm’s systems;
(iv) promote without heavy spend;
(v) emphasize: availability, suitability, value perception, and communication;
(vi) focus thinking on what to do and what will work rather than the theoretical marketing process.
It is sensible for professionals to use validated academic work but it is also important to understand the limitations of these concepts.