This week I’m focusing on research that I’ve co-authored with Xin Wang in Business Horizons. We called this ‘Uncovering the Message in the Mess of Big Data’. Our article aims to explain to managers how they can work out what the messages are in large amounts of data. What Data Should You Look At? The classic application…
Category: Understanding Marketing
Why Even The Best Economists Don’t Get Marketing
George Akerlof and Robert Shiller have good points, excellent stories, and a clear aim in Phishing for Phools. The aim is to convince economist colleagues that all market outcomes aren’t perfect. I applaud their aim. That said, their conceptualization assumes consumers (and others) are robots with a monkey on our backs. The monkey prevents us from being “fully rational”. I’d say, however, that we…
How Do We Determine Author Order?
Academics enjoy splitting into obscure little groups. What is more they rarely agree about what is interesting. Perhaps the only thing we can agree on is that academics, and the problems facing academics, are fascinating. A major problem for academics is determining author order on joint works. Academic Teams Most academic articles are created by teams. Given that, in marketing…
A Couple Of Word Clouds To Better Understand Marketing
I thought it’d be helpful to share a couple of word clouds to better understand marketing. Word clouds are sometimes looked down upon by academics but they can be very simple visual ways to summarize text. Are they deep analysis, no, but they are a fun place to start. Word Clouds To Better Understand Marketing:…
Word Clouds And Marketing Thought
Word clouds are a useful way of condensing large amounts of text. Obviously, they don’t perfectly describe complex ideas but they can highlight what a text is about in an easy-to-digest manner. Word clouds typically let the number of times a word is used dictate its size in the cloud. Interesting colors and exotic placement of the words allow for…
Marketing Journal Co-authorship
What do we know about marketing journal co-authorship? Marketing Journal Co-authorship Why do people co-author? This question surely occurs to every academic. Who hasn’t waited for a particularly tardy co-author to return a paper that you really must submit now. It is natural to think, ‘why’. Or maybe ‘WHY‘. It is useful that scholars have investigated the reasons…
What Metrics Do Managers Use?
Mintz and Currim examined what metrics do managers use? What drives metric use? And how does this tracks to performance? These are fascinating questions. The paper has two aims I’d say. Firstly, academics will be interested in the model that the authors use to try and tease out the “why” behind the metrics. Secondly, managers might…
What Are Marketing Doctoral Programs Like?
A key question for marketing academics concerns the nature of doctoral programs. As such I highly value academic service papers like Elbeck and Vander Schee (2013). They undertook an in-depth look at what is happening in marketing PhD programs. So what are marketing doctoral programs like? Consumer Behavior Is On Top Firstly, they confirmed the dominance of consumer…
When Is Too Much Success A Bad Thing?
Social Psychology, and the related field of Consumer Behaviour, relies on laboratory experiments. This has great benefits. Lab experiments give the flexibility to investigate causation and test interesting ideas. They have been very successful. When is too much success a bad thing? Lab Experimentation Given the benefits of lab experiments Consumer Behavior scholars doing experimental work have come to dominate marketing. I’d…
Explaining Omitted Variable Bias
Charles Whelan’s Naked Statistics is an enjoyable and informative read. He does a very good job of simplifying statistics. He explains what statistical methods can do but also the problems that people get into using statistics. Here I’ll focus on him explaining Omitted Variable Bias. Whelan tackles this problem very clearly. Explaining Omitted Variable Bias Omitted variable bias sounds like…
