There are two themes to today’s post. One is the difference between upsell and cross-sell. The other theme considers citations supporting claims. Alex Turnbull in a blog post defends the value of upselling. He differentiates between upselling and cross-selling. (Before choosing to lump them together for the rest of the blog). Defining the terms is…
Category: Academic-practitioner divide
The Practitioner-Research Divide Beyond Marketing
Neil Anderson and his colleagues has given a lot of thought to the divide between research and practice in Industrial, Work and Organizational (IWO) Psychology. While I don’t know much about this discipline a lot of the problems seem quite familiar. They note problems within psychology with a trend towards parts of the discipline with…
The Challenge of Not So Simple Marketing Performance Measures
Bruce Clark reviewed the history of performance measures in 1999. He saw three main themes: “the movement from financial to non-financial output measures, the expansion from measuring only marketing outputs to measuring marketing inputs as well, and the evolution from unidimensional to multidimensional measures of performance” (Clark, 1999, page 711). As someone who was working…
Net Promoter and lessons for academic research
I value academic work that speaks to the issues of managers and others outside of academia. The Net Promoter Score/System (NPS) is widely used by managers and so it can be valuable when academics look into this metric. We (I worked with Charan Bagga now at Calgary, and Alina Nastasoiu now at Booking.com) reviewed the…
The Sokal Hoax
A fascinating event in academic history was the Sokal Hoax. In this a physicist, who had become annoyed with ideas that reality is completely socially constructed, got published in a cultural studies journal. Before we celebrate his inter-disciplinarity he was satirizing social studies. The text he sent was gibberish. As he said; “Nowhere in [the…
Improving Measurement With Big Data
The data being used by managers is becoming increasing messy. Unstructured data is named as such because it lacks the nice organization of traditional data. Of course, the profusion of such unstructured data (text, videos, music) makes analysis complex but also brings considerable opportunities. Big data brings big headaches and big possibilities. Alina Nastasoiu, a…
In defense of a really silly idea
One the silliest things that academics do is compare the number of A publications people have. The idea that a career can be summarized by a single number is clearly absurd. Even if research publications are all that count (and I think that is obviously nonsense) A publications aren’t all the same. While it is…
Why aren’t academics more relevant?
Much academic research is not connected to any immediate practical outcomes. This isn’t necessarily bad — some research can have value to society more broadly or over a longer period. Saying that will happen can be a bit of a cop out however. ‘This will be extremely valuable a long time after I die so…
Big Data and the Academic Practitioner Divide
I find the divide between academics and practitioners fascinating. It is clearly very large and I find it amazing how easily many people on both sides accept it almost without question. Academics are often woefully unaware of the topics managers discuss. Reading the Managerial Implications section in academic papers can vary between boring (incredibly predictable)…