Viewpoint:
After 50 years of IJMR, the state of marketing
Malcolm McDonald
Emeritus Professor, Cranfield University School of Management
Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about and not much to listen to, while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating and even gruesome, may make a good tale and take a deal of telling anyway. (Tolkien 1995/1937)
Perhaps there is some point to all the intellectual whingeing about the state of marketing, as the following very brief review of the three major players in our domain will reveal. (For a fully referenced, double-blind reviewed paper, see ‘Marketing existential malpractice and an etherised discipline: a soteriological comment, Journal of Marketing Management (McDonald & Wilson 2004).) Even the tongue-in-cheek title reveals the depths of the views of a longstanding Professor of Marketing about the state of our profession!
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information …
This comment by T.S. Eliot (2004/1934) makes a valid point, which all of
us need to take on board if we are not to see the inevitable sidelining of marketing
continuing.
The first major constituent in marketing is practitioners. The paper referred to above gives copious evidence of major companies that maximised profits at the expense of customer needs over two decades, and that inevitably disappeared.
Board rooms continue to revere profit and loss accounts, even though there is frequently only one line for revenue and several lines for costs, with the result that what causes the revenue (the lead effects) are rarely reported and discussed. Equally, out-of-date balance sheets continue to dominate in boardrooms, even though over 80% of capital value resides in intangibles (see Table 1).
In capital markets, success today is measured in terms of shareholder value added, having taken account of the risks associated with future strategies, the time value of money and the cost of capital. Most large corporates have formally constituted audit committees doing financial due diligence on capital plant, acquisitions and the like, using real option analysis, probability theory, Net Present Value and other techniques, but have no formal process for carrying out due diligence on the major value of their companies: intangibles. Such is the extent to which we have failed in the marketing community.
Table 1 Intangibles
P&G has paid £31 billion for Gillette, but has bought only £4 billion of tangible assets
Gillette brand £4.0 billion
Duracell brand £2.5 billion
Oral B £2.0 billion
Braun £1.5 billion
Retail and supplier network £10.0 billion
Gillette innovative capability £7.0 billion
Total £27.0 billion
Source: Haigh (2005)
Meanwhile, very few companies measure customer retention by segment, and even fewer know the real profitability of their top ten accounts.
Consultants have fared little better, with the author uncovering over 300 fads during the past 30 years. Again, evidence that ISO 9001, BPR, balanced scorecards, knowledge management and the like have failed is provided in the paper referred to above.
Worst of all, however, is the academic community. According to Hugh Wilmott of Manchester Business School: ‘Much research is directed at technical refinement which produces low risk, quick win publications that are largely irrelevant or incomprehensible to practitioners’ … ‘Of ten issues identified by the MSI of America, only 4 were addressed in the top, 5 star rated academic journals over a 2 year period’ (McDonald 2000).
More recently, with the growing influence of the Research Assessment Exercise, the trend to irrelevance has got much worse. Take my own lighthearted parody of what senior academics face when reviewing certain papers for double-blind refereed journals:
In undertaking an in-depth perusal of the evolutionary interaction of this acronymic organisational communication, the dual orientation for the analysis paradoxically required an unashamed repositioning of the eclectic conceptual framework amongst the multi-disciplinary body of illuminative speculation in predominantly scholarly bureaucratisation.
Yet, coincidentally, its empirical complexity had to remain relevant to the esoteric realities of postmodern professorial integrative antecedent development trends at appropriately conceptualised and operationally-implemented meta levels.
Consequently, it was necessary to review the independently formulated psychometric traditions and to employ confidently the articulatedly-present phenomenological methodologies currently available for polysyllabic paradigm exploration. Unfortunately, the ensuing generalised multifaceted model for evaluation (in its specific systems dimension, naturally) had unexpectedly and unexplainably exploded – though not exhaustively. The major administrative atomistic components, suitably enumerated, are now, unfortunately, somewhat hindering the Assessor’s understanding process. However, tabulation analysis of the topography implicitly indicates that comprehensive evaluation of the interdenominational micro data has finally exhausted the course Assessor and any further critical, unbiased, postmodernistical review, will just have to wait until he has had a few strong gin and tonics!
While this is obviously absurd, this writer often despairs of the plethora of papers submitted to him for review that are statistically valid but virtually useless to practitioners. Indeed, the wisdom of the following comment from Jeremy Bullmore (2006) sums up what an increasing number of us are feeling and experiencing in the academic community:
There are many excellent scientific journals devoted to neurosurgery. Month by month, they publish learned papers, each having been subjected to rigorous peer review, that chronicle the latest discoveries, hypotheses, case-studies and innovations in the neurosurgery world. And the shocking thing is this: they are never read by neurosurgeons.
Patients are put at risk because of the apparent disdain that the practitioners have for academic theory and the accumulated wisdom of others.
You’ll have read the above with growing incredulity. That can’t be true of neurosurgery, you think. And you’re right,
thank God. It isn’t true. But in another trade, much closer to home, it very nearly is.
In a brief comment like this, suffice it to say, those in charge of allocating funds and making or breaking the careers of aspiring academics need a wake-up call to the consequence of their so-called ‘scientific’ approach to marketing.
The main point is that, for marketing to survive and indeed thrive as the powerful function we know it can be, some radical changes need to take place. Realising marketing’s full potential requires universal recognition of its acute strategic importance to the economies of nation-states, and commitment to the adoption of a sensible approach to its implementation. Failure to learn from over 50 years of experience to date will have long-lasting negative implications.
We must find a way of escaping the increasing proclivity of the academic community to creep deeper and deeper into the more esoteric groves of academe, talking about increasingly narrow issues in an increasing impenetrable language to an increasingly restricted audience. We must address issues that
are of concern to the real world and central to business success. We can, in doing this, be scholarly and academically rigorous, but we must learn to translate our findings into actionable propositions. For me, papers such as ‘Fifty years using the wrong model of advertising’ by Robert Heath and Paul Feldwick (2008) in the last edition of IJMR (50, 1) set the benchmark, as the paper is scholarly, intellectually challenging and of great relevance to practitioners.
Marketing is long overdue for a reality check, so the writer appeals to journal editors, business school directors and others to encourage a movement towards a more realistic and relevant pursuit of marketing excellence.
References
Brand Finance Annual Conference (2006)
Unpublished Proceedings of The London Stock Exchange, London, 17–18 August.
Bullmore, J. (2006) Stephen King: bridging the great divide. Market Leader, Spring, 32, pp. 14–16.
Eliot, T.S. (2004/1934) The Rock. In: T.S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays. London: Faber & Faber.
Haigh, D. (2005) Brand finance. Marketing Magazine, 1 April.
Heath, R. & Feldwick, P. (2008) Fifty years using the wrong model of advertising. International Journal of
Market Research, 50, 1, pp. 29–59.
McDonald, M.H.B. (2000) Unpublished paper presented at the Academy of Marketing Conference, University of
Derby, 3–15 July.
McDonald, M.H.B. & Wilson, H.N. (2004) Marketing existential malpractice and an etherised discipline:
a soteriological comment. Journal of Marketing Management, 20, 3/4, April, pp. 387–408.
Tolkien, J.R.R. (1995/1937) The Hobbit. London: HarperCollins.
International Journal of Market Research 50(2), 2008
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