Farewell!

Citation

Crosier, K. and Pickton, D. (2007), "Farewell!", Marketing Intelligence & Planning, Vol. 25 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/mip.2007.02025gaa.001

Farewell!

It is with mixed emotions that I take my leave of you, at the end of a self-imposed five-year tenure as Editor, taking Marketing Intelligence & Planning from its twenty-first birthday to its quarter century.

It will be good to have my life back, but I have very much enjoyed working with the contributors of the 245 articles we have published in those five volumes. They (you, if you are one) have been nice people, and said kind things about our working relationship. I thank them heartily for keeping my mind in shape when my brain told me I should be out on my bike.

I thank you too for reading what we worked hard to put together for you. It has been rewarding to know that our journal remains near the top of the table of Emerald's 180-odd titles, in terms of number of downloads. I hope that is because you appreciate our positioning at the interface between pragmatically-minded academics in the business-school environment and the sort of practitioners, typically marketing planners in the marketing communications service business, who want to keep abreast of serious thinking rather than what passes for it in the trade journals (Ouch!).

I also want to offer public thanks to the 29 members of our Review Panel, 25 of whom have this year diligently, and usually pretty promptly, read submissions across the range of quality and appropriateness, and fearlessly given unpopular recommendations ... in both directions. It is harder to commend a paper that has something useful to say but may need revision more than once on the way to acceptance, than it is to reject it. I am duly grateful when our reviewers spot the hidden value. A separate list in this issue names the people who contributed in this way through the preparation of Volume 25, including the close and distant colleagues who were inveigled into doing so ad hoc.

I have used the personal pronoun too much so far. Marketing Intelligence & Planning is a co-production. I owe a debt of gratitude to Publisher Richard Whitfield and Assistant Publisher James Rand at Emerald, who have been true and patient collaborators, and to Assistant Editor David Pickton, who has a few words of his own to say after mine.

He has not been given the usual task of writing a review of the year this time, because of the bumper bundle of nine articles we have for you, to close this chapter in our journal's life. For the same reason you will not have to read any of my usual editorial “alarums and excursions” (Shakespeare: see Brownlie's Right to Reply) before we get down to the business of what the authors have to say.

First, though, let me introduce you to your next Editor. Ross Brennan is Reader in Marketing and Chair of the Marketing Group at the Middlesex University Business School, London. He has won many a Best Paper award, was Guest Editor of a Special Issue, in 2004, and is a member of our Review Panel. I leave it to him to complete the introductions in the first issue of Volume 26, though you can meanwhile visit him in cyberspace at: www.mubs.mdx.ac.uk. You will be in safe hands.

We open this issue with a Viewpoint from a trio of academics at two American Universities. Mark Hill, John McGinnis and Jane Cromartie follow up their own previous Viewpoint, “The obstacles to marketing thinking” by drawing our attention to a curious contradiction inherent in the way the theoretical base of the marketing discipline has been developing since 1925. Some academic colleagues may react to the very title, “A marketing paradox” in the same way as they did to one of mine back in 1975: “What exactly is marketing?” A non-question and a non-paradox. If so, I believe they will be wrong. “Questioning” is not a luxury, to be put aside in the pursuit of the next research application or client presentation. Even if it teaches us nothing we do not already know, more or less, it seldom fails to deliver at least one moment of “Well, now, I'd never thought of it that way before”.

The paradox that Mark Hill and his co-authors identify derives in part at least from the traditional scholarly view of how a discipline should be developed. That is also the theme of the next article, though the connections will not jump up and wave at you. Douglas Brownlie, a Co-Editor of Rethinking Marketing: Towards Critical Marketing Accounting (Sage Publications, 1999), also wants us to spare a few moments in questioning where or discipline is heading, and why we are standing back as it trots towards the cliff. He writes from a Department of Marketing at a Scottish university to take issue with the focus in two recent Viewpoints on the “identity” of marketing, both written by Weel Kent faces (as we say in Scotland) in the UK's academic marketing community. I leave it to you to decide for yourself who holds the ring in the end. You should have fun in the process, and come away with your mind at least slightly rearranged.

Let me pick out one issue with special resonance for an Editor: the tactic of chopping a large research study into discrete parts and publishing several articles, replete with copious self-referencing. There is an argument to be made in its favour. Over the past five years, submissions to Marketing Intelligence & Planning have grown longer and longer, at least partly because of the crazily proliferating literature to be reviewed, but also because analytical software encourages multiple hypotheses and a battery of statistical tests. An article we will come to a little later, for instance, has 19 of the former to which nine of the latter are applied: 171 “results” to be digested. I suspect that, even when the topic coincides with a reader's own interests, the will to press on begins to evaporate after about 6,000 words. (The average for the seven mainstream articles here is just over 8,500.) Many times, I would have been happy to publish research studies in instalments: for my benefit and yours, not the authors'.

We stay in Scotland with the lead author of the next contribution, but the research study took place in the home country of his two co-authors, Portugal. Luiz Moutinho, Pedro Dionísio and Carmo Leal apply a very different analytical framework from the structural equation modelling I just mentioned (you guessed!). It may be qualitative, and therefore immediately suspect, but it is worth noticing the trouble the researchers took to capture the richest data possible (few forced-choice scales here), and to code it systematically. What other choices did they have, methodologically, given the focus on cults, consumer tribes, fans, brands ... and surfing?

The focus groups in Portugal were 10:1 male:female, evidently accurately reflecting the gender composition of any group of surfers and surfer-watchers. Quite right, but it would be wrong to extrapolate this to all spectator sports. Anyone who was passed by “Henman Hill” at Wimbledon will have seen the other end of the scale, and the World Rugby Sevens tournaments, for instance, sit somewhere in between. The literature review is dominated, necessarily, by English sociologists banging on about football (as UK politicians tediously do, to demonstrate identification and affiliation) and French philosophers ruminating about life in a postmodern society that sounds like an idealised France. It would be interesting to read a comparative study of “fandom” and consumer tribes in another sport.

I used to urge students embarking on dissertations not to assume that “primary research” was necessarily better than secondary. There are often fresh insights and important new conclusions to be drawn from the re-manipulation of existing data. Claudia Klausegger, from a University of Economics in Austria, joined forces with co-authors at two business schools in the UK, Rudolf Sinkovics and Joy Zou, to analyse the large data bank generated by a survey commissioned by Reuters. Its focus was on the existence of information overload in business organisations in the USA, the UK, Singapore, Kong Kong and Australia, and the consequences. The international comparisons are fascinating in themselves, but particularly significant from a marketing management point of view were the high incidence of associated stress, the conviction that technology could not make things better, and the sufferers' behaviour in response. Overloaded managers used information selectively, discarded much, stored some for the future (quite possibly never retrieved), put off some tasks altogether, worked overtime, and took work home with them.

As the authors themselves put it, their findings are “key issues for anyone who has managerial responsibility for teams charged with the task of gathering and using marketing intelligence” who needs to devise “strategies to cope effectively with information overload, rather than (as many respondents thought their colleagues would) shifting the task to someone postponing it, or hoping that it would go away if left undone.”

Juha Munnukka, from a Business School in Finland, studied one of the telecommunications providers whose services can contribute to information overload. I imagine we all recognise how much more urgent the ringtone of a mobile phone (cellphone) seems than the same signal emitted by a traditional handset, or the arrival of an e-mail message than the envelope in the in-tray, and that is certainly part of the problem that Klausegger and her colleagues describe. However, it is beyond the remit of Munnukka's study, which set out to identify the “common denominators” linking early adopters of mobile communications services of all kinds, as an input to market segmentation. Statistical analysis of data collected by postal questionnaire from almost 800 medium-to-heavy users in the customer database of a Finnish mobile communications service provider in 2003 found that the best predictor of early adopters of a new service was previous experience of related services, such as fixed-line internet access or hand-held computers.

It is tempting to think that, in 2007, a study of late adopters would be more helpful strategically. But new products and services are introduced to this market so frequently that there will be innovations to be adopted in the marketplace for the foreseeable future. Thus, the findings will still be a sound basis for market segmentation and campaign targeting, though the author points out that they should be applied with due caution beyond Scandinavia.

Now, to China. To be precise, to Hong Kong, and a Health Centre on a university campus there, catering mainly to staff past and present but also to students. Jackie Tam set out to measure customer satisfaction and the intention to patronise the same Centre the next time, at the start and finish of a two-year period during which changes were implemented in response to the findings of the first phase and also at the behest of management. Factor analysis of data collected in interviews with more the a thousand patients leaving the premises showed that a service quality programme based on patient feedback had indeed improved both measures.

Tam further concluded that active management commitment to quality improvement was a crucial preconditions for the effectiveness of the programme. Like Munnukka, she cautions against generalising her findings beyond the location of the study. They sound pretty universal to me, apart from the matter of Chinese-versus-Western treatment options.

Next, to a Chinese environment outside the People's Republic and another similarly non-commercial service-delivery programme located on three university campuses, in Taiwan. Shwu-Ing Wu investigated students' information-processing behaviour in the context of a programme of on-campus cultural events and activities, which the universities in question hoped would turn them into fully rounded individuals as they went out into the world. This is the study I referred to earlier, which applied the full range of SEM statistics to a path diagram incorporating eight factors relating to stages in an information-processing hierarchy, and no fewer than 19 hypotheses concerning their interrelationships. But blame the song, not the singer. The software exists, and it requires enormous self-discipline to construct a model parsimoniously and report findings selectively. The temptation is very strong to say, in effect, “I did all this, and you're going to sit still while I tell you about it”. Personally, I would have split the findings into two reports, separating one relating to the central process and the SEM statistics from another dealing with the mediating influence of personality attributes and MANOVA analysis. But Wu's article in fact just makes my 6,000-word cut-off, if you discount the references, figures, tables and (valuable) appendix. Her findings demonstrate a good fit of the model to the data, and do suggest both segmentation and communications strategies for the planners of the information campaigns. Here again, the distinctive national characteristics of the research respondents limit the scope for generalisation.

I did find myself wondering, by the way, just how altruistic the universities' motives were. Well satisfied, well rounded alumni are a future source of financial support as public funds dry up, are not they? US universities think so, and UK universities are learning fast.

Do not be deceived by the names of the two authors of the next article, Ian Phau and Denise Ong. We are now at a Business School in Western Australia and back on our surfboard. Their study is concerned with “green” claims made in point-of-sale promotional materials by clothing brands. One with an unarguably green reputation was matched against another that has no such credentials, but is associated with the great outdoors and a healthy lifestyle. Yes: the outfits worn by those guys in the veteran VW camper vans (and their gals, Moutinho et al.).

Three kinds of green claim made for both brands were rated by almost 400 shoppers in a large mall, by Likert-scale responses to hypothetical statements in a self-completion questionnaire. Simple statistical analysis of the data found that responses were more positive to claims about the green-ness of the product than to those featuring the altruistic activities of the company. Either type was more credible if emanating from an authentically eco-friendly source. Phau and Ong conclude that manufacturers and retailers should concentrate their efforts on cultivating a green identity through their outlets and packaging, as a proxy for the objective environmental credentials of their products.

Finally, out tour of the world beyond the Anglo-Saxon axis bring us to Cyprus, from where Demetris Vrontis and Alkis Thrassou, Dean of a Business School and head of its Marketing Department, think aloud about business-consumer relationships in the distinctive environment of the developed countries. (Cyprus is a recently-joined member of the European Union.) This was neither submitted nor reviewed as a Viewpoint, but is very much a point of view with which to round off this bumper last issue.

What I appreciated about its approach to crystal-ball gazing was the implicit parent discipline. Marketing is good at borrowing from psychology and economics, but largely ignores the massive literature of sociology and anthropology. I find that odd, given that market segments are social groups: tribes, in the case of the Portuguese surfing fraternity. Perhaps the methodologies are too soft for our taste, or it may be that academic sociologists are too hostile to marketing to collaborate with us. Whatever the reason, I regret the absence.

Vrontis and Thrassou concede that their paper takes “an idiosyncratic approach to the subject, aiming to generate scholarly discussion and further research, not to offer definitive answers”. Whatever you may make of their own diagram of the business-consumer relationship, I urge you to agree with them that “it is time for planners to look at [the relationship] anew”.

A total of nine characterful contributions for you – and from me, well, that is all folks!

Keith CrosierEditor

Here's to the future

It has been both an honour and a privilege to be a part of the editorial team at Marketing Intelligence & Planning. I have enjoyed my time as Assistant, working in support of Keith Crosier.

If I reflect on the past five years, what stands out as the most important change is the transition from editorial prerogative as the basis of acceptance for publication, which had worked well for 25 years under our widely experienced and well connected Founding Editor, to formal double-blind peer review. My opinion, which might sound immodest if voiced by the Editor himself, is that we have together nurtured an important, significant and internationally recognised journal, which reaches a large and diverse readership around the world, especially on line, and attracts authors from all the continents. I too am confident that Ross Brennan and his new editorial team will maintain the momentum, taking on the outstanding agenda items for the future, notably the strengthening of the Editorial Advisory Board, recognition in the influential listings, and electronic submission and tracking. Welcome to them.

Keith and I will not be suddenly severing the valued connections with “our” journal altogether. We hope to be invited to join the new Editorial Advisory Board, and will gladly serve as reviewers on demand. I shall myself be working on a forthcoming Special Issue, so watch this space!

I await the next five years in a spirit of confidence and optimism.

David PicktonAssistant Editor