I see much value in opinionated books, they are great at starting conversations. Bearing that in mind I will say that I enjoyed Duff McDonald’s The Golden Passport. He describes the history of Harvard Business School (HBS) and he isn’t afraid to give his thoughts. What then can we learn from a case study of…
Search Results for: academia
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…
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….
The Persistence of Academic Customs
Recently I was reading Max Weber’s thoughts on “Science as a Vocation” given in a lecture on November 7th, 1917. By science Weber means knowledge creation in the broader sense so pretty much all academics should be included as scientists. It can also tell us about the persistence of academic customs. The Persistence of Academic Customs There…
Motivation For The New Year
Let us start the new year thinking about how motivation works. What encourages us to action? How can knowledge help us with motivation for the new year’s resolutions? Simple Views Of Motivation Dan Ariely has a new book on this topic. And to motivate you to read it I’ll say it is a very short book. Ariely…
Bad Arguments
A lot of arguments simply don’t make sense. Spotting bad arguments is a vital, and I’d guess, rare skill for academics and business people. Ali Almossawi has a fun little book on bad arguments. They are all illustrated to make them more memorable. I don’t completely endorse all the descriptions. Still, he raises important things to bear in mind…
How Do Academic Marketers Choose Their Objectives?
I think one of the great problems in marketing academia is that we spend a lot of time thinking about our models and very little time on our data. We have increasing clear views of how things connect up but we don’t really know what it is that we are connecting up. Deciding what objective…
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…
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…
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…