Category: Understanding Marketing
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Constructing Academic Research Questions
How academics come up with research questions is an interesting and important topic (at least to academics). Sandberg and Alvesson study the creation of Academic Research Questions. They look at how academics in organizational studies describe the way they came up with research questions . The journals reviewed were major journals: Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Management…
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Academics As Thinkers, Managers As Doers
In an interesting interview Gary Bridge, Managing Director of Snow Creek Advisors, shared his thoughts on the managerial/academic divide. He is pretty critical about academia but I think he is largely right. What does he have to say about academics as thinkers, managers as doers? Thinkers, Doers & Academic Gamesmanship Bridge starts with the comforting thought…
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Good Marketing And Social Missions
Managers often have challenges understanding how to position their brands and companies when contentious public issues find them. More interesting in some ways are companies whose managers seek out contentious issues. It is very hard to measure the net impact of having a contentious social mission. Experiments are hard to run on social missions. Yet,…
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Eras of Marketing
My first degree was in history and I am always interested in how people classify history. Time is continuous, it just keeps on coming. Yet, human beings often find it hard to make sense when something is continuous. It is much easier to operate with items grouped in some ways. We like to see things…
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Buying And Selling Attention
Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants is an interesting book about buying and selling attention. History Of The Market For Attention I must confess I enjoyed the first half more than the end. The end of the book is a pretty conventional view of where we are now. I don’t think anyone will be surprised to…
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Measuring The Impact Of Marketing On Wall Street
Bernd Skiera, and a couple of colleagues, have a paper that considers a relatively recent wave of research in marketing academia. They tackle event studies. These look at the impact of specified “events” on the value of a firm. Measuring the impact of marketing on Wall Street. Marketing Events Clearly marketers tend to concentrate on marketing events.…
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Smoothing Data
Excel can be a very useful tool. Though it cannot easily do the most advanced statistical tasks. Excell can tackle most everyday business analytics. Today we see how a business advisor discusses a range of challenges including smoothing data. Balanced Scorecards Ron Person shows how to produce balanced scorecards in a book that is packed…
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Field Guide to Lies
Daniel Levitin has an very enjoyable and informative popular science book in his Field Guide to Lies. He surveys how we know what we know, and how we communicate it to others. To be fair not all of it is about lies, for instance, he discusses how data is collected. A lot of the problems he…
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Conducting Business Tests
We should be conducting business tests to have more confidence we are doing the right thing. Small And Big Decisions In business decisions are often taken “without having any real evidence to back them up” (Davenport, 2009, page 69). This is a source of great frustration to me, (and many academics). To be fair sometimes there…
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Why Don’t Businesses Experiment More?
One puzzle for academics, myself included, is why businesses don’t experiment more? Why Don’t Businesses Experiment More? Experiments have great potential to improve business outcomes. Often businesses don’t seem to do much experimenting. Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus…
