From Serendip to Sisyphus?

On relevance in academic marketing research

STRUCTURE

• The research process and the research outputs

• The ideas and empirical results

1999 Serendipity = Turnbull

2000 2001 Serendipity = Ankers

2002 2003 2004 Serendipity = Harker

IMP The Managerial Irrelevance of IMP

IMP The Pursuit of Relevance in Interaction & Networks Research

Jnl. Bus. Res. Sophistry, Relevance & Technology Transfer in Management Research

MIP SI Should we worry about an ac-prac divide in marketing?

Empirical study of IMP conference N=58

Qual. Study of 10 managers

MIP Managerial Relevance in Academic Research: An Exploratory Study

MIP SI Is there an ac-prac divide in B2B marketing?

Qual. Study of 8 academics

IMP A Qual. Study of IMP Researchers’ Perceptions of Relevance

2005 Serendipity = Baines

2006 Serendipity = Gill

2007 Serendipity = Brownlie

2008 2009 2010

AM Mind the Gap: The Skills Practitioners Want and the Skills we teach

MIP SI Mind the Gap: The Skills Practitioners Want and the Skills we teach

AM Perceptions of Research Relevance Among UK Marketing Academics

EBR SI Theory & Practice Across Disciplines: Implications for the Field of Management

EJM Perceptions of Research in Marketing

Two Qual. Focus groups

AM + MUBS Perceptions of Research in Marketing

Survey N=128 academics N=510 commercial

2011

2012

2013 Serendipity = Tzempelikos

2014 Serendipity = Lichtenthal

2015 2016

JBIM Improving Relevance in B2B Research: Analysis & Recommendations

JBBM Reflections on 21 Years of JBBM

Re-analysis of earlier data

The Managerial (Ir)relevance of IMP

Ross Brennan, Middlesex University

Peter Turnbull, Birmingham University

The lines of enquiry

• Sophistry/symbolism: whatever made you expect this stuff ever to be useful?

• Relevance lost: well, of course it was good stuff once upon a time, but now they’ve lost their way ... just need to get back to basics

• Technology transfer: a great scientific endeavour which has not effectively been converted into useful technologies

Line of enquiry 1: Sophistry

• Astley 1984: “management scientists fulfil largely symbolic, rather than directly practical, functions for managers ...the primary point of reference for scientists is not the objective reality of management practice, but the ideationally based reality generated through interaction with other scientists”

Line of enquiry 1: Sophistry

• sophistry = clever but fallacious arguments; concern for winning an argument rather than discovering the truth

• an alternative perspective

– the Sophists proposed that failure in rhetoric was a serious matter - skill in rhetoric being necessary to show the rightness of your ideas

– too little sophistry in the IMP tradition?!

Line of enquiry 2: Relevance lost

• Johnson & Kaplan 1987: “the isolation of existing courses, textbooks, and research from the interesting and challenging problems of contemporary practice”

• failure of management accounting to keep up with changing times

• leading to the “activity-based costing” approach

Line of enquiry 2: Relevance lost

• Why did management accounting systems become irrelevant?

– product lines expanded

– production technology changed

– product life cycles shortened

– global competitive conditions shifted

– great advances in IT occurred

• Cf. Ford (1998)

Line of enquiry 3: Technology transfer

• Transfer of technology from lab to industry is difficult enough with “hard science”, even harder for managerial technologies

• A preliminary list of barriers to TT based on literature ... – different attitudes towards research

– different perspectives on public dissemination

– incompatibility of reward & promotion systems, hence little exchange of people

Line of enquiry 3: Technology transfer

• Barriers to TT, continued ... – fundamentally different aspirations and goals

– cf. “source-recipient incompatibility”

– bureaucracy (perhaps inherent in this, different speeds of response)

– legal barriers (e.g. the exclusivity dilemma)

– reluctance to resource “linkage manager”

• Complication that IMP is a loose, international network , without “ownership”

Conclusion 1

• Sheth/Sisodia, JAMS 1999: “the surprising paucity of instances in which academic research in marketing ... has resulted in widespread change in business practice”

• perhaps the managerial irrelevance of IMP is but a microcosm of the greater managerial irrelevance of scholarly research in marketing?

Do we care about managerial relevance?

Anonymous IMP reviewer (recommending rejection) But the overall problem might be that there is no problem in the first place – as commented by one interviewee, “we do not care”. Interviewee 3 … those people who have been through the courses and have been exposed to the ideas, I think they do find them relevant. So the question is why has the IMP Group been so bad at selling its relevance? And the answer I suspect is we don’t care.

Do we care about managerial relevance?

Table 1: Perceptions of relevance among IMP conference delegates (Dublin, 1999)

Question % %

How enthusiastic are managers to adopt ideas

from business-to-business academic research?

Not enthusiastic

Slightly enthusiastic

31.6

Moderately enthusiastic

Very enthusiastic

68.4

How important is it that academic research should

be of potential practical value?

Not important

Slightly important

17.9

Moderately important

Very important

82.1

Of how much interest would your current

research be to managers?

None/little

8.6 Moderate/substantial

91.4

Of how much practical value would your current

research be to managers?

None/little

6.9 Moderate/substantial

93.1

Overall, how relevant would you say your current

research was to management needs?

Not relevant

Slightly relevant

6.9

Moderately relevant

Highly relevant

93.1

Findings from qualitative study

“To provide leading edge knowledge to society but if that society chooses not to use it I don’t think it is our job to beat up on them and say ‘you’re idiots’. You can put the water in the trough and bring the horse to the trough, but if they don’t want to drink then that’s not an academic’s problem.” (Interviewee 1)

“I see it as my role to be relevant to practitioners … I see my role, and I see the role of (employing institution) to be positioned between theory and practice.” (Interviewee 2)

On the role of the academic researcher

The latter position more characteristic of interviewee responses

Findings from qualitative study

“I think it works two ways in the sense that business is often in front of the academics. By going out and talking to business we bring that back and begin to put frameworks around it and we model it and we play with it and we tease out and dissect (the underlying meaning of business concepts).” (Interviewee 6)

On knowledge transfer and barriers

“The biggest barrier is probably the reward structure, it does worry me how we are rewarded for publishing research … I understand the rules of the game, we play the game, that doesn’t mean I like the rules. The kind of research that would get me published in ‘A’ rated journals is not the kind of stuff that managers find useful. When is the last time that you spoke to a manager who ever read anything in the Journal of Marketing or the Journal of Marketing Research?” (Interviewee 3)

Don’t we all feel like that sometimes??

Perceptions of Research in Marketing

Perspectives from the Academic and Professional Marketing Research

Communities

Paul Baines, Cranfield University Ross Brennan, Middlesex University Mark Gill, Ipsos MORI

Rationale

• The overall rationale for the project is to contribute some valuable empirical data to the debate about the relevance of academic research to marketing practice

• Additionally, we investigate the mutual perceptions of academic and professional marketing researchers

Ac/prac divide & relevance debate

• McAllister (2005:131): “I am worried about the field of marketing. It seems to me that we are becoming very narrow and that we are moving away from relevance.”

• Reflects wider concern within practice-related fields about relevance of academic research to practice

• So what? Does relevance matter?

The case for relevance

• Piercy (1999; 2000; 2002) & Tapp (2004) – What research do marketing managers value?

– What media do marketing managers use?

– Piercy: relevance in research involves significant career-related risks

– The RAE (amongst other things) encourages irrelevance

• Marketing academics should seek to benefit the marketing practitioner community

The contrary case

• Stakeholder argument – Marketing practitioners are only one out of several stakeholders

– Generally with their own substantial resources

• Timescale argument – Do practitioners have too short-term a focus?

• Marketing theory/marketing knowledge argument – Academics as curators of marketing knowledge?

The ‘relevance debate’ (personal highlights)

• Astley, W Graham (1984), "Subjectivity, Sophistry and Symbolism in Management Science," Journal of Management Studies, 21 (3), 259-72.

• Brennan, Ross and Peter W. Turnbull (1999), "The managerial (ir)relevance of IMP," in Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the IMP Group. Dublin: University College, Dublin.

• Starkey, Ken and Paula Madan (2001), "Bridging the Relevance Gap: Aligning Stakeholders in the Future of Management Research," British Journal of Management, 12 (Special Issue), S3-S26.

The ‘relevance debate’ (personal highlights)

• Grey, Christopher (2001), "Re-imagining Relevance: A Response to Starkey and Madan," British Journal of Management, 12 (Special Issue), S27-S32.

• Cornelissen, Joep (2002), "Academic and practitioner theories of marketing," Marketing Theory, 2 (1), 133-43.

• Piercy, Nigel (2002), "Research in marketing: teasing with trivia or risking relevance?," European Journal of Marketing, 36 (3), 350-63.

• Brennan, Ross (2004), "Should we worry about an academic-practitioner divide in marketing?," Marketing Intelligence and Planning, 22 (5).

Research method for this paper

• Online survey delivered via …

• Email with web link

• To membership list of UK Academy of Marketing

– Augmented by web site analysis

• 128 responses from 1484 emails sent out

– 8.6% (terrible)

Table 1: Sample demographics

Frequency

%

Gender

(n=128)

Male 81 63

Female 47 37

Age

(n=128)

Less than 34 19 15

35-44 30 23

45-54 52 41

55+ 27 21

Position

(n=128)

Professor/Reader 29 23

Lecturer/Senior/Princi

pal

85 66

Research Position 5 4

Other 9 7

Highest academic

qualification

(n=128)

Undergraduate 8 6

Master’s 56 44

Doctorate 58 45

Other 6 5

Table 3: Academic research activity

Frequency %

Articles published in peer-reviewed

academic journals during your career

(n=119)

0 22 19

1-10 49 41

11-20 14 12

21-30 11 9

31-40 10 8

41-50 5 4

51+ 8 7

Articles published in peer-reviewed

academic journals in the last 3 years

(n=105)

0 27 26

1-5 53 50

6-10 19 18

11-15 3 3

16-20 1 1

21+ 2 2

Amount of time in hours per week (averaged

across teaching & non-teaching periods)

spent on academic research in marketing

(n=117)

0 20 17

1-10 52 44

11-20 25 21

21-30 13 11

31-40 3 3

41+ 4 3

Table 4: Relevance of academic marketing research to managers

Frequency

%

How interested do you think managers would be

in your current research?

(n=88)

Not at all interested 2 2

Not very interested 10 11

Fairly interested 48 55

Very interested 28 32

How relevant to managers will your current

research be in the short term (next 12 months)?

(n=87)

Not at all relevant 1 1

Not very relevant 8 9

Fairly relevant 52 60

Very relevant 26 30

How important is it that academic research in

marketing should be of practical value to

managers?

(n=103)

Not at all important 1 1

Not very important 12 12

Fairly important 40 39

Very important 50 49

What risk of conflict between practical relevance

and academic rigour in academic research in

marketing? (n=106)

No risk at all 13 12

Slight risk 28 26

Moderate risk 35 33

Substantial risk 30 28

Table 9: Differences in perceptions of relevance between Professors & Lecturers

Professor

mean

score

Lecturer/

Senior/

Principal

mean

score

T

value

Significance

level

How interested do you think managers

would be in your current research? 3.4 3.0 2.1 .038

How relevant to managers is your current

research in over 5 years 3.6 3.1 3.0 .004

How enthusiastic are marketing managers

to adopt ideas from academic marketing

research?

2.6 2.3 1.9 .060

How important is it that marketing research

should be useful to managers? 3.0 3.3 2.1 .042

How important is it that marketing research

should be business-focused? 2.9 3.2 1.9 .064

Conclusion

• Note limitations

• Marketing academics at British universities generally believe that their own research is of interest and relevance to managers, and they consider it important that academic research should be relevant to managers.

• When respondents claimed that their own research would be of interest and relevance to managers was it wishful thinking, or was it based on considered evidence?

• Perhaps: ‘most academic marketing research is pretty irrelevant stuff, but of course the work that I do is relevant’

-19%

-2%

+74%

+56%

USEFULNESS OF SOURCES…

Academic journals

% “net” useful

How useful do you find the following as sources of professional information? (Practitioners)

Newspapers

Professional magazines

Web sites

Base: 510 marketing research practitioners. Fieldwork: 8 September – 29 September 2006

2%

3%

7%

10%

16%

72%

KNOWLEDGE OF JOURNALS…

IJMR

% know a fair amount/great deal

How much, if anything, do you know about the following marketing journals? (Practitioners)

Jnl Cons Research

Jnl Marketing Research

European Jnl of Marketing

Base: 510 marketing research practitioners. Fieldwork: 8 September – 29 September 2006

Jnl of Marketing

IJPOR

PERCEPTIONS OF ACADEMIC RESEARCH…

Academic research is…

Base: 510 MR practitioners and 128 MR academics. Fieldwork 29 June – 29 September 2006

Practitioners Academic Researchers

Accessible

Useful to managers

High standard

Published quickly

Impartial

Business-focussed

Good value for money

Comprehensible

Useful for govt

Professional

Not accessible

Not useful to managers

Low standard

Published slowly

Biased

Not bus.-focussed

Poor value for money

Incomprehensible

Not useful for govt

Amateur

5

-64

-13

31

-26

-3

62

37

1

47

-69

-75

-50

-51

40

-14

-37

27

27

34

Balance of opinion (%) (7+6+5) - (3+2+1)

PERCEPTIONS OF COMMERCIAL RESEARCH

Balance of opinion (%) (7+6+5) - (3+2+1) Commercial research is…

Base: 510 MR practitioners and 128 MR academics. Fieldwork 29 June – 29 September 2006

60

30

-9

-57

-6

4

21

92

64

68

49

87

83

91

73

69

90

51

39

64

Practitioners Academic Researchers

Not accessible

Not useful to managers

Low standard

Published slowly

Biased

Not bus.-focussed

Poor value for money

Incomprehensible

Not useful for govt

Amateur

Accessible

Useful to managers

High standard

Published quickly

Impartial

Business-focussed

Good value for money

Comprehensible

Useful for govt

Professional

CONCLUSION AFTERTHOUGHT

• So, was it relevant?

• Where does RB now stand on relevance?

• The wider scheme of things

– Relevance and the RAE

– The REF and ‘impact’

• Areas for further research?....