Seven Reasons Why Marketing Practitioners Should Ignore Marketing Academic Research

Australasian Marketing Journal, 2004 by November, Peter

Lven with these caveats, the proposition that, in general, advertising has a positive impact on sales is hardly news to a marketing practitioner.

And after many studies have been done in an area of marketing, a major difference seems to exist between the generalisation of science, such as Ohm's Law, and the generalisations that we can produce. Ohm's law is a generalisation for the flow of electricity in a conductor. It is both generally true and specifically true. It can be used to predict say the current flowing in a specific conductor given a knowledge of its resistance and the voltage applied across it [4].

Marketing generalisations, such as there being a positive relationship between advertising spending and sales, do not help with the specifics of advertising decisions. Once advertising budgets are set there are innumerable problems of detail to be handled, any of which can affect success. How many studies, how much time and how much money will be required before all these problems can be solved with our current research methods? Indeed are there theoretical grounds for even thinking that it is possible to produce empirically based generalisations for all this detail (irrespective of time and money)?

Many marketing decisions such as advertising have both quantitative (how much to spend on advertising) and qualitative (message and medium) dimensions. We also know that, at the brand level, there are important relative, as well as absolute, effects. It is not simply a case of how much you spend or what your advertising message is, but also a case of how much you spend relative to your competitor and what their message is in comparison with yours. Are generalisations ever going to help with this kind of complexity? And yet practitioners handle this every day without help from a set of empirically verified, statistically significant generalisations.

The most dangerous generalisations are those which are promulgated without question and which are used to build the very foundations of a discipline. Undoubtedly for marketing the key generalisation is the marketing concept.

While Narver and Slater (1990) among others (Aaker 1988, Kohli and Jaworsik 1990, Peters and Waterman 1982) supported this notion, doubts as to its universality have been expressed (Hart and Diamantopoulos 1993, Greenley 1995, Wong and Mavondo 2000) although Kotler (1973), rather surprisingly, was perhaps the first to draw our attention to this possibility. This is strange because the very public debacle of arguably the epitome of a marketing oriented company, IBM in 1992, should have raised significant doubts (Rogers 1986, Carroll 1993, Heller 1994). But it took a non-marketing academic (Christensen 1997) to provide both evidence and a theoretical foundation that explains why the marketing concept is not a universal generalisation. Yet seven years later most of us still teach it as a fundamental part of marketing!

#7 Replication

The seventh reason why practitioners should ignore our work is that its truth-value is highly questionable: often it is not even thin ice, it is water.