The world of marketing research is as distant to practice as it can be. I was reading an article published by Rust and others in Journal of Marketing in 2004 titled “Measuring Marketing Productivity: Current Knowledge and Future directions”.
The article identified 3 challenges in the area of marketing management.
1. Long-term effects of marketing activities
2. Creating a divide between individual marketing activities and various actions
3. Use of purely economic or financial ways to measure performance which has proved inadequate for justifying marketing investments. This has led to discussion of various other non-financial measures.
These are very big problems in the field of marketing however, no definitive answers exist. Moreover, there is questions of marketing's value in firm. Very few researchers have looked at it.
Strategic questions which emerge for marketing presently are:
- Why does linking marketing assets to capitalization matters? Can these assets be leveraged to provide strategic options?
- What is marketing’s contribution in managing core business processes or is it going to become a tactical silo dealing largely with advertising (this is what laypersons think about marketing, isn’t it)?
- Most times we have seen reactive esoteric models of marketing which attempt to measure customer behaviour. However, the need is there to measure the behaviour pro-actively as to how customers will respond to a certain marketing action.
- Most companies manage multiple brands and interesting enough we are still to see research in the field of marketing which addresses issues related to the same comprehensively.
- We don’t have a guideline on how much resources to spend on each marketing alternative to get maximized impact (results). What we have presently are the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) models which measure CLV but don’t provide strategic answers to above questions.
- One to One marketing, Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM) have become buzzwords, however we don’t have models which can predict individual customer beahaviour and therefore, what we really have aggregate models which at best provide general answers and not customized solutions as most claim.
- There are very few customer level longitudinal data based studies in marketing. Almost all studies are based on cross-sectional research. The limitations of this method are known however, not much has been done in this regard.
- Much work remains to understand how competition and environment influence firm value.
The above mentioned issues highlight two important things according to me.
- There is a lot to be done in the field of marketing, if marketing has to gain any respect in the world of management.
- We by ourselves will have to put an end to the esoteric cross-sectional research at some point in time as it fails to answer questions which really matter to managers.
We will have to find answers to the above questions soon if marketing is to regain its once respected position in the field of management.
Source:
Rust, Roland T.; Ambler, Tim; Carpenter, Gregory S.; Kumar, V.; Srivastava, Rajendra K. (2004), “Measuring Marketing Productivity: Current Knowledge and Future Directions,” Journal of Marketing, 68 (4), 76-90.
Shukla, Paurav (2008), what we don't know in the field of marketing.
