Seven Reasons Why Marketing Practitioners Should Ignore Marketing Academic Research

Australasian Marketing Journal, 2004 by November, Peter

In strong disciplines there is a 'natural' organising framework built into the knowledge itself. In Chemistry there is the Periodic Table as well as subdivisions into Inorganic, Organic, Physical, etc. In Mathematics there is Algebra, Arithmetic, Geometry, Statistics, etc. In Structural Einguistics there is Phonology, Morphology, Syntax and Semantics. In Geology there are eons, eras, periods and epochs. In Music and Art there are the major historical periods. We have no agreed fundamental structure round which we build knowledge - only a ragbag system of textbook chapter headings. Its absence means that practitioners, with their narrow self-centred perspective on knowledge, are bewildered. What is truly remarkable is that marketing academics seem to thrive with a flimsy rather than a well-grounded structure of knowledge.

#3 Causality

The third reason why practitioners should ignore our work is that we sometimes make false or misleading statements about causality in our arguably misguided efforts in seeking relationships between variables in marketing systems.

Perhaps practitioners can be forgiven for not understanding the difference between causality and association, and we can help by wording our findings very carefully. However this is a mistake that academics should not make in their own work and reviewers need to be vigilant so that unfounded claims of causality do not taint our published literature. Let me illustrate this point with what must be one of the worst examples of this in recent times.

Narver and Slater (1990) wrote what some regard a classic and seminal article in the Journal of Marketing. It was a study largely devoted to a method of measuring market orientation, but it is better known (correctly or incorrectly, depending on your point of view) as giving the first empirical research evidence that the Marketing Concept is true even though it was predated by a British study (Lynch, Hooley and Sheperd, 1989) that did the same. Their conclusions section begins with the words (p. 32):

"The findings support our hypothesis that . . . market orientation is an important determinant of profitability."

This is an unconditional causal statement and it is potentially seriously misleading. Readers are given no indication here or anywhere else in the article of how important a market orientation is, nor what other things are important, nor how it compares with other orientations, and there is no explanation as to how much effort should be put into obtaining a market orientation nor the extent to which the cost of doing this will affect profitability. In addition, and of particular importance here, the proposition suggests that market orientation has a causal impact on profitability. While the word 'determinant' is not the word 'cause', it means practically the same thing.

Do these authors understand that they cannot make such a claim? The mind-boggling answer is YLS! In the very same article they say (p. 33):

"The cross-sectional nature of the data in our study restricts conclusions to those of association, not causation."