People often think academics are progressive or “woke”. Don’t worry though, we have plenty of bigotry in marketing academic research too. Today I’ll look at a 2021 article on the religious affiliations of CEOs and the impact of their religion on advertising decisions and, through this, firm financial performance. If you are thinking I hope the authors were careful treading in such sensitive subjects. Don’t worry again, they weren’t. It really is as crap as you might imagine.
An Important Gap
An important gap in academic writing means: “we are going to do some research no one else has done despite there being a good reason no-one has bothered to do it”. The good reason is usually that the gap is trivial. The authors of the article manage to go one better by being both offensive and trivial.
We address the important gap in the literature based on two central related research questions. First, does the CEO’s personal religious affiliation influence the firm’s advertising spending decisions?
Oh et al, 2021, page 1442
Seriously why is this an important gap? No marketing manager has ever said to me, “I wish you marketing academics would delve into documenting CEOs’ religions”. Why would they?
Practical Implications
Now think what the practical implications are. Imagine you find that Protestants spend more on advertising and that increases firm financial value (as these authors claim to). What should the board do: only hire Protestant CEOs? That seems like it is, and absolutely should be, completely illegal.
They don’t say it that clearly instead they say:
Second, the managerial implication of our results is that Boards of Directors, seeking to decrease or increase marketing spending, realize that there are personal characteristics of a CEO such as religious affiliation-based values that can influence the CEO’s propensity for such spending. In certain cases, the CEO’s personal values may be aligned with those of the firm’s spending goals. For example, Catholic (Protestant) values are aligned with firms which seek to decrease (increase) advertising/marketing spending.
Oh et al. 2021, page 1443.
Rather than be clear they vague it up. But to be clear they suggest hire a Catholic if you want to cut advertising spending and a Protestant to increase it. They also claim that advertising spending leads to increased firm financial value. So, I think their logic is that you should only hire a Catholic if you want to lower firm financial value. That seems a rare business aim in my experience.
They are basically saying hire Protestants (not Catholics) as CEOs. Really, I mean really…….
Bigotry In Marketing Academic Research
The paper looks at characteristics of Catholics and Protestants. You might think that sounds a lot like an old racist comic doing the ‘white people dance like this but black people dance like this routine’. It is.
They have some nonsense theory about risk tolerances. They cast their “theory” back to Weber. I’m always a bit worried looking at what people thought about religion from one hundred years ago. Remember at the time the US had the KKK telling us their thoughts on keeping the country a white protestant country. Europe had various bigots telling us that countries with Catholic heritage couldn’t compete with Protestant heritage countries. The fact that Ireland is, by many measures, richer than the UK now, doesn’t seem to have impacted anyone’s thinking. I was brought up a Catholic in a Protestant country. I’ve seen this shit before.
It Could Be Worse, And Probably Will Be When More Data Becomes Available
The good news is that they could only get enough US data on Catholic and Protestant CEOs to do their tests. This study really could have been a lot worse. I am sure they would have happily plugged in any data and weakly justified any old racist result that they got out.
Maybe they had some sort of bigoted agenda but I’m pretty sure that they just weren’t thinking. (Academics often aren’t big thinkers). The way to publish in marketing academia is often just to throw data into a model, see what comes out, and then make up some bullshit theory. We should be ashamed of where we are as a discipline.
As more data is becoming available, we need to be serious about theory and practical implications going forward. I don’t want to find weird racist, or otherwise bigoted, papers saying that having a CEO from [fill in the ethnic/religious/social background] is a bad idea.
And It Uses Tobin’s Q As A Dependent Variable
An excuse might be that even though the work touches on sensitive subjects it is valid. Maybe we have to confront reality even if the conclusion isn’t what we’d want it to be. But don’t worry, it is poor quality work anyhow so you shouldn’t bother taking anything from it.
The core dependent variable is Tobin’s Q which is used as a proxy for firm financial performance. This allows them to claim religious affiliation leads to advertising spending which in turn leads to better firm financial performance. Unfortunately, Tobin’s Q is biased to show that advertising spending creates firm financial success even when it doesn’t. Our 2018 Marketing Science paper is an extended discussion of why this is the case. Their 2021 paper ignores our 2018 paper that completely undermines their claims.
Our dependent variable for testing H2 is Tobin’s q (TQ) which reflects the firm’s shareholder value and is measured by the market value of the firm divided by its total assets. Firms with higher TQ are valued higher by its shareholders.
Oh et al, 2021, page 1452
No! That isn’t true. They make a statement about Tobin’s Q and Total Assets (my italics) which is manifestly untrue. They tell us this themselves “AT is the book value of total assets” page 1467. Any marketing strategy scholar should understand that financial accounting book value is not the true value of assets. Have these marketing strategy scholars even heard of brands that are notoriously typically omitted from book value? They are simply wrong.
It is bad marketing strategy scholarship as well as bigoted. I wish people would stick to one element of crapness per paper.
In Conclusion: This Is Offensive And Just Plain Bad
How can this rubbish be published in the 2020s? I am angry and offended. The authors should be ashamed of themselves. I am pretty ashamed to be a marketing professor given my field is still publishing shit like this.
For other examples of bigotry in marketing academic research see The Danger of Data Mining, Scientific Thinking Is Hard (Especially For Academics), and Ostriches, Eagles, And Leadership Storytime
For more on why Tobin’s Q shouldn’t be used this way see Tobin’s Q: Why Academics Should Listen To Managers | Marketing Thought, What Can The Marketing-Finance Interface Tell Us About Witchcraft Trials? and Proving The Value Of Marketing
Read: Hannah Oh, John Bae, Imran S. Currim, Jooseop Lim, and Yu Zhang. (2021) “Influence of CEOs’ religious affiliations on firms’ advertising spending and shareholder value.” European Journal of Marketing 55, no. 5, 1440-1468.
