Comparing consumers in different countries can be challenging. I must confess to having doubts about a lot of cross-cultural research, see here for lots of grouchy comments on cross cultural measurement. I worry it is what nice middle class people do when they want to stereotype while still seeing themselves as free of prejudice. Suffice…
Category: Understanding Marketing
Credit Hours, Outcomes, Academic Missions And School Brand
Mark Garrett Cooper and John Marx have a lively take on the American research university in their book Media U. They discuss the linkage between academic missions and school brand. Popular Features Of Universities Allow The Intellectual The authors discuss how American research universities have always required an audience to deliver value. A key point…
Good Practice In Undergraduate Education
One of the strangest things about being a professor is that outsiders think this means you are primarily a teacher. As a researcher, you feel that you aren’t primarily a teacher. (Some snooty colleagues even find being called a teacher a bit of insult). The particularly strange thing is the outsiders do have a sensible…
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…
Bribery Works With Students
In what might be classed as a stunningly unsurprising result Michael Hessler and his colleagues did an experiment to demonstrate that bribing students with cookies helps with evaluations of teaching. The headline is that bribery works with students. Broadly speaking I have no doubt that they are right. I have seen a few criticisms of…
Advertising Budgeting And Managerially Relevant Research
Academic research occasionally desires to be practical. Various journals therefore often have sections that allow for the reporting of the results of practical work with managers. The journals publish such studies even where there aren’t significant theoretical contributions. In the past the Marketing Science journal has published work under “Applications”. In this vein Doyle and…
The Data Gender Gap
Caroline Criado Perez’s book focuses on the challenges facing women in a world where the primary gatherers of data have been/usually still are men. It highlights the problem of data heavy systems not being as fair as the idea of impartial ‘math’ might imply. (See also here). The problem of what Perez calls the data…
Thinking Differently About Business School Cases
Bridgman, Cummings, and McLaughlin in their 2016 paper about the case method tell us that the conventional history of the development of business case teaching is missing some vital elements. Cases nowadays come from the perspective of management. There exists a management objective that the students are trying to deliver. This excessively managerial perspective is…
What Caused The Classic Polling Disaster?
In presidential election polling 1936 stands out as a uniquely bad disaster. What caused the classic polling pisaster? 1936, The Worst Ever Polling Disaster? In 1936 The Literary Digest made a prediction that Republican Alf Landon would beat the incumbent Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a landslide. This rates as arguably the biggest disaster…
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…
