Byron Sharp is a pugnacious writer. He outlines what he describes as the empirical laws of marketing. This allows him to talk about those who give bad advice. Basically, this is anyone who gives a recommendation that does not follow the empirical laws he describes. I appreciate the forthrightness. Too many academics aren’t willing to…
Category: Academic-practitioner divide
The Pseudo Profound Statement
I have previously written about how disappointed I was by Jerry Muller’s The Tyranny of Metrics, see here and here. Today I will look at a broader problem that his book exhibits. Namely ‘The Pseudo Profound Statement’. I see this in a lot of places not just in Muller’s work. Be Careful With A Pseudo…
Machine Learning And Retailing
Joseph Ryoo, Xin/Shane Wang, Praveen Kopalle and I have an article available now in the Journal of Retailing. This focuses on machine learning and retailing. It is a major question how new technology will change retail. Our work therefore tries to get a grip on this. Reviewing Machine Learning And Retailing In The Literature We…
A Total Q Mystery: Understanding Academic Marketing
I was disappointed to read Du and Osmonbekov‘s 2020 paper in the International Journal of Research in Marketing, see here. The authors clearly don’t mind hard work and I’m sure they have useful empirical skills. Still they aren’t young researchers making errors or rushing a paper to the market. They can do better. It is…
Upselling, Cross-selling and Reliable Data
There are two themes to today’s post. One is the difference between upsell and cross-sell. The other theme considers citations supporting claims. Upsell And Cross-sell 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 Practitioner-Research Divide Beyond Marketing
Neil Anderson and his colleagues have given a lot of thought to the divide between research and practice. They focus on this in Industrial, Work and Organizational (IWO) Psychology. I don’t know much about this discipline. Still, a lot of the problems seem quite familiar. As such, they highlight the practitioner-research divide beyond marketing. In…
The Challenge of Not So Simple Marketing Performance Measures
Bruce Clark reviewed the history of marketing performance measures in 1999. He saw three main themes. “[T]he 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). This raised the challenge…
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. What then can we say about Net Promoter and the lessons for academic research? Reviewing The Literature…
The Sokal Hoax
A fascinating event in academic history was the Sokal Hoax. A physicist reacted to the idea that reality is completely socially constructed and determined he would get published in a cultural studies journal. Satirizing Academic Publishing Before we celebrate Sokal’s inter-disciplinarity it is worth noting that he was satirizing social studies. The text he sent…
Improving Measurement With Big Data
The data being used by managers is becoming increasing messy. Unstructured data 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. We have some advice on improving measurement with big…