Marketing science: where's the beef? - failures in efforts to establish the scientific aspect of marketing theory - includes bibliography

Business Horizons, Jan-Feb, 1994 by L. McTier Anderson

Further, measuring advertising effectiveness has become mired in controversy, with copy-testing firms debating which is more important: "recall" (how well consumers remember a commercial) or "persuasion" (how well it produces immediate results). Some researchers even pinpoint a third measure: "likability." Yet crowd-pleasing tactics such as celebrities and humor do nothing to improve a commercial's persuasiveness, according to research systems corp., an Evansville, Indiana advertising-testing firm. Commenting on Pepsi's award-winning "Uh-huh" spot, Mark Gleason, the firm's senior vice president said, "I'm sure everyone loves this spot, but it had no impact on changing brand preference" (Bird 1992).

Even more damning, there is now evidence to indicate that consumers' loyalty to national brands may be hitting an all-time low. "Private-label products are rapidly gaining share in product categories that were once considered bastions of brand loyalty" (Deveny 1992). This undercuts the primary argument for advertising: that advertising is an investment in brand loyalty!

Eveready's ubiquitous pink bunny illustrates another major advertising problem. This Eveready Energizer campaign suffered initially because 40 percent of the viewers who named the commercial as the most outstanding advertisement in a Video Storyboard Tests, Inc. survey thought that the advertisement was for Duracell, a competitive brand and share leader. Unfortunately, it is common for viewers to remember a challenger's creative advertisement but to associate the advertisement with the leading brand. The highly popular 1979 Polaroid advertisements featuring James Garner and Mariette Hartley suffered a similar fate. A high percentage of viewers believed that those ads were for Kodak (Lipman 1990).

Commenting on Beecham, Inc.'s highly publicized $24 million malpractice suit (subsequently settled out of court) against Yankelovich, Skelly & White, Robert Ross, an associate professor of marketing at Wichita State University, said his proposals for marketing studies state that the results will be strong indicators of trends or directions in the market, but with no guarantee the results will bring absolute success because of the almost daily changes occurring in the marketplace. Ross's contract also states that the study's results are to be used only as a tool, along with the client's knowledge of his or her products and services and the marketplace, in making the final marketing decisions (Knutson 1988). In essence, Ross is saying that marketing is as much an art as it is a science and that "sophisticated analytical tools" have very little predictive validity.

The scholars who first raised the question of marketing's scientific credentials had noble intentions, and the early results of the science movement were positive. Academics and practitioners became more scientific in investigating marketing phenomena and developed an impressive scientific infrastructure for the discipline. But many academic leaders soon became more concerned with achieving the "mantle of sciencehood" than with enhancing the study and practice of marketing. They overemphasized quantitative analysis while ignoring glaring weaknesses in the discipline's theoretical knowledge. Simultaneously, academia's emphasis on "publish or perish" led to a proliferation of journals filled with manuscripts on increasingly esoteric topics. For example, Peter and Olson (1983) raised the question, "Is Science Marketing?"