Toward Insight and Relevance

Iam worried about the field of marketing. It seems to me that we are becoming very narrow and that we are moving away from relevance. In this essay, I propose that marketing's shift in focus from practice to science, which partially characterizes Wilkie and Moore's (2003) "fourth era of marketing thought," has had at least two unintended consequences: an insecurity-driven narrowing of the definition of "science" and a growing dogma that threatens to disallow managerial relevance in consumer behavior research. I believe that these two problems are exacerbated by the combination of rapid growth in the number of well-trained marketing scholars and the lack of change in the number of pages in our "premier" journals. Wilkie and Moore (2003) document marketing's shift in focus from practice to science by tracking the Journal of Marketing. They note that practitioner articles in Journal of Marketing have decreased from 42% to 1% and that practitioner participation on the editorial board has decreased from 60% to 5%. Given the increasing time demands placed on practitioners and the growth in the number of welltrained academic researchers, I believe that most of us in the field perceive this general shift as appropriate. It is good that our journals shift from "war stories" to "scientific studies." Unfortunately, there are some additional, unintended consequences of this shift. First, the field seems to define "scientific" evermore narrowly. MacInnis (2004) suggests that the field has come to equate "scientific" with "empirical." She points out that the number of conceptual articles in leading marketing journals has declined steeply since the early 1970s. Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Marketing published between 40 and 55% conceptual articles in the early 1970s, and they publish less than 5% conceptual articles today. As MacInnis notes (p. 1), "Scientific progress proceeds through an iterative process with conceptual ideas spurring empirical observation, which in turn give rise to more conceptual ideas." Our bias against conceptual papers disrupts this process for the field of marketing. MacInnis (2004) points out that this bias might exist because, as a discipline, we are insecure about our scientific status (e.g., Arndt 1985; Bass 1993; Taylor 1965). We operate in what MacInnis calls (p. 3) "a prototypic 'scientific' mode," setting empirical research as the standard. To me, our avid borrowing from economics is consistent with this hypothesized insecurity. We fill our journals with evermore complex models and techniques while seldom questioning whether the new techniques perform better than existing techniques or whether new insight is gained. Furthermore, I see no evidence that economists are willing to acknowledge the foundational research that has been conducted by marketers. Economists have recently "discovered" scanner data and "uncovered the fact" that promotions have a large impact on sales. These economists do not cite the foundational research in marketing journals. One of marketing's most distinguished researchers has said to me: "Economists will never cite our work." Such behavior by economists is unscientific and unprofessional. Why do we tolerate it? Why can we not put the role of economists in proper perspective? Let's borrow from them when they have tools that will help us achieve new insight, and let's insist that they give credit for the work that has been published in marketing journals. The second unintended consequence of our move into the fourth era of marketing thought is that consumer behavior researchers who take a nonmanagerial viewpoint on consumer research are poised to dominate the research agenda. Wilkie and Moore (2003, pp. 132-33) point out that "consumer research has progressed with some attention to a managerial rationale for its efforts, but with a major proportion of its endeavors having no such purpose whatsoever (e.g., Belk 1986; Holbrook 1987; Wilkie 1981)." Since the Journal of Consumer Research imposed its editorial policy disallowing the inclusion of managerial implications, I have been told by consumer behavior doctoral students and junior faculty that they perceive there to be a bias in their target journals against managerially relevant consumer behavior research. If they wish to publish and be promoted (they tell me), they cannot do managerially relevant research. I believe that the pendulum has swung too far. Just as it is "OK to do consumer behavior research that is not managerially relevant," it should also be "OK to do consumer behavior research that is managerially relevant." The changing structure of the field of marketing has made these two problems worse. Wilkie and Moore (2003) note that for the past 25 years, growth in business school enrollment has driven strong demand for faculty in "publish-orperish" career paths. An increasing number of doctoral programs supply well-trained researchers. As a consequence, we have five to ten times as many well-trained researchers publishing in marketing today as we had in 1980. In that same time period, we are up from 7 marketing journals to something around 47 (Baumgartner and Pieters 2003). These new journals, though, tend to be specialized and targeted to particular niches. The number of premier journals, as well as the number of pages in those journals, has not changed since the early 1980s. Given this imbalance between the number of well-trained researchers and the number of pages currently available in Leigh M. McAlister is H.E. Hartfelder/The Southland Corporation Regents Chair for Effective Business Leadership, McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin (e-mail: Leigh.McAlister@ mccombs.utexas.edu). She is also Executive Director, Marketing Science Institute. The author thanks all her colleagues who helped her think through the problem addressed, especially Ajay Kohli and Debbie Maclnnis.