Marketing Thinking and Doing

The history of marketing reveals an uneasy relationship between marketers and their academic counterparts. At best, they support one another’s endeavors and may even partner to develop ideas and technologies. At worst, they ignore one another and may even view their counterpart with some disdain. While the latter is not useful, this 100-year old ambivalence in marketing is in some ways quite natural and its foundational quality quite old. Aristotle, for example, distinguished thinking (theoria) from doing (praxis). We think there is a strong case to be made for stronger interactions between the two for the betterment of marketing. Consider weaving as an analogy. Individual fibers have value separately; when combined, they can produce useful materials or beautiful tapestries. To apply the analogy to marketing, academics and practitioners operate in distinct worlds with their own styles and requirements. The result for each can be a limited view of marketing—one focused on the threads relevant to their worlds. However, when each weaves at least some of the other’s thinking and doing with their own, the resulting fabric is likely to be more valuable to the field and to the world at large. Why write about the opportunity for a thinking-doing weave to introduce the Special Issue on “From Marketing Priorities to Research Agendas”? The reason lies in our purpose, which is to publish a set of articles that offers insights regarding how the Marketing Science Institute’s (MSI’s) priorities—determined every two years by polling corporate members—might be understood and advanced from an academic perspective. To that end, MSI created the MSI Scholars program in 2018 for mid-career scholars interested in translational research and invited them to participate in this challenge. Our purpose was to support these scholars on their quest and to invite practitioners and academic perspectives to challenge and complement their work. Observing the process of writing and reviewing the articles and commentaries over the past few years has shown us it is much harder than it should be to fit together two things that should go hand in glove. Reflecting on these experiences and our roles in the field more broadly, we observed challenges, inspiration, and important lessons that we want to record in this editorial. On an optimistic note, we must insist that academics and practitioners of marketing are stronger together. This is why we selected weaving, which brings together different fibers into a masterful whole, as an analogy. We also believe, to quote Maya Angelou (1991, p. 5), that “we are more alike . than we are unalike. ” In fact, many marketing practitioners act like academics, using the marketplace as their laboratory, while many scholars know how to take a practitioner’s perspective and seek to improve marketing practice. Many academics have moved their research activities into the field, and many practitioners have brought more rigor and scholarship into their organizations. The process of creating a better weave is already underway. Although we believe that the two roles should mainly stay distinct, we focus on how the weave we envision offers important academic and practitioner benefits. We then consider strategies for fostering these more productive interactions across the field.