The discipline of marketing hasn’t kept up with the rapid changes facing 21st-century businesses. New scholarship doesn’t have enough management relevance, and practicing marketers are too often forsaking rigor. Here are seven strategies that can make marketing both relevant and rigorous in today’s world.
The world in which marketing operates has fundamentally changed. Has marketing research and practice kept up? The answer, says the author, is no.
At the heart of the current trouble is a severance of academic rigor from managerial relevance. Through its maturation as a discipline over the past half century, marketing science in academia has emerged as a rigorous field. Conjoint analysis, econometric modeling, techniques derived from mathematical psychology, and many other tools and approaches have revolutionized its practice. But many of the most rigorous tools were developed years ago, in response to old problems. And managers and organizations increasingly find those tools irrelevant to the new challenges they face. So business practitioners adopt approaches that appear to address their real and current marketing problems but that lack the rigor of the academically established methods.
Now, argues the author, we need to rethink and transform the field of marketing so it balances rigor and relevance. He details seven strategies that would help achieve that aim: Bridge the disciplinary silos. Shift from traditional management to network orchestration. Change the focus from customer relationship management (CRM) to customer managed relationships (CMR). Shift from company-branded products to customer-branded solutions. Use analytics and metrics as the glue. Adopt the adaptive experimentation philosophy for all your activities and strive for empirical generalizations. And, challenge (and change) your mental models.
And how to pursue those strategies? In a collaboration between both practitioners and academic researchers, says the author.
(Editor’s Note: This article is excerpted from a paper the author presented when he accepted MIT’s 2007 Buck Weaver Award, which recognizes individuals who have made important contributions to the advancement of theory and practice in marketing science. The full text of the paper, “Rigor and Relevance: A Key Marketing Challenge,” is available online at sloanreview.mit.edu.) [PRODUCTION NOTE TO SEAN: Joanna Zito is creating a PDF of this manuscript. Not sure which directory is appropriate for storing this PDF...? --Beth]
3 Comments On: A Plan to Invent the Marketing We Need Today
The marketing of today is something that is largely influenced by not only yesterdays marketing efforts… also tomorrows evolution of todays marketing efforts need to be respected if we want continuous effect.
This is a great article touching the nerves of everyone working through the transitions and revolutions in marketing and advertising worlds which have been accelerating over the past decade
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This free tool bridges holds a key to the brave new marketing world, with respect to the “plan” outlined in this truly seminal work to take leaps forward across the traditional/digital divide.
robert
Great article. It’s amazing how the internet has changed marketing completely over the last ten years, and continues to change now. No company can afford to ignore it’s online reputation. And no company will survive without creating a unified online marketing strategy. I find many companies take much of this for granted. “Sure, I want to do that social media thing. Ignore the revolutionary shift in consumer behavior at your own peril. These things cannot be taken for granted. As the author said, People want communities, customization, and choice. It’s a full time job promoting your firm online. But it’s an absolute necessity in today’s world.