Does Business School Thinking Affect Marketing Action?

Does business school thinking change the way that marketing executives do their job? Or do business schools simply look at how marketing done in the ‘real world’ and school business students in what already takes place?

I’m pretty sure that most marketing executives are unaware (and probably disinterested) in alot of the very specific and arcane thinking and research work of the majority of marketing academics. This is a fact that worries some academics as they perceive an increasing gap developing between what academics find ‘interesting’ and what marketing practioners would like to know in order to be better at what they do. There are many journal articles on this theme such as:

Musings on Relevance and Rigor of Scholarly Research in Marketing. Varadarajan, P. Rajan. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Fall2003, Vol. 31 Issue 4, p368-376

Beyond the one-dimensional marketing manager: The discourse of theory, practice and relevance. Brownlie, Douglas; Saren, Michael. International Journal of Research in Marketing, May97

The Academy and The Practice: In Principle, Theory and Practice Are Different. But, in Practice, They Never Are. Pringle, Lewis C.. Marketing Science, Fall2001, Vol. 20 Issue 4

The concern in Business Schools is growing so much that the July 2009 edition of The Journal of Marketing leads with a guest editorial by David Reibstein, George Day and Jerry Wind called Is Marketing Academia Losing Its Way?

I’m not sure this is actually the case. At the moment there are two key interelated conversations taking place. One in Academic circles and the other in the digital Social Media space.

The mantra of the Social Media is all about connecting, collaboration, networks, open source, and influence. (At the extremes of course its about SEO or internet selling but the dominant theme is about the social dimension and serving your customers well.)

The hot topic in Business School marketing is Service Dominant Logic This is an idea put forward by Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch in a 2004 Journal of Marketing article called Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing. In a nutshell it claims that a new ‘theory’ of marketing is necessary to explain how marketing is done in the 21st century. The authors emphasise its not simply making a case for the value of Service Marketing versus Goods Marketing its actually concerns a profound mind-set change that embraces, co-creation, collaboration, and networks.

So how much of what we read on blogs, airport lounge management books, marketing magazine articles and so on really comes from this original source? and how much is the work of Vargo and Lusch simply a reflection of what is happening ‘out there’ in the real world? Perhaps it becomes self referencing. Marketers seeking out ‘academic’ verification and a pat on the back for things they are up to. A sort of co-creation is good because Pine, Gilmour, Vargo and Lusch say it is and overlooking the possibility that these writers might be simply making sense of what they see not actually prescribing something marketers should do!

As for Academia the Vargo and Lusch article has ruffled feathers. Not everyone has bought into the appeal of a new marketing logic that replaces the old ‘wonky’ one of Levitt and Kotler. In particular John and Nicholas O’Shaughnessy have claimed in their January 2009 Vol 43 no.5/6 European Journal of Marketing article The Service Dominant Perspective:a backward step that the Vargo and Lusch approach is a crude attempt to provide the impossible. They imply that seeking on absolute theory of marketing is based on a ill-founded positivistic assumptions. The idea that ‘out there’ there is an ideal form of Marketing just waiting to be discovered. They favour a multi-perspective approach. There are many ways to explain marketing.

Now how relevent this debate is for every day marketing is a moot point. It seems on the one hand we have a desire to improve the decision making and problem solving capability of everyday marketers and the other we have curiosity in marketing as a social phenomenon.

Maybe just maybe the muti-persepective approach is what Marketing really needs because versatility of perspective encourges innovative thinking. So think again when you read blogs and tweets about the service dominant imperative. Are you un-thinkingly being forced done one channel of thought. Are you sure you really know which marketing school is influencing what you do!

Will Technology Convergence Change The Way We Think About Marketing?

I subscribe to a great blog called Serious Games and this latest post highlights the rate of technology convergence and its impact on the increased use of Social Media and the decrease of traditional Media.

I can see that if your world is marketing communciations then technology is having a big impact on the places where advertising is placed and brands are positioned.

The change of channels might have changed but has technology driven any degree of fundamental change in marketing thinking? I find it hard to see how this can be the case.

Surely the technology can only manifest what the practioner’s philosophy decrees. So a micro economic Kotlerian position will see the technology as a means to facilitate needs based exchange, standing in Nordic School position will see technology as a means to enhance relationships, look at the world through Vargo and Lusch’s Service Dominant logic and the technology is their to underpin community building and co-creation of products and services.

Didn’t all of these things exist before digital techologies? The marcomms tactician used to be skilled in media planning and production that utilised 20th century technologies, all that has changed is the hardware and software. Nothing has necessarily changed for Marketing as a philosophy or a strategic endevour. Or has it?

Convergence is certainly interesting from a consumer demand perpsective. Do people like you and I prefer Convergent or Dedicated Products Han, Weong and Seok have found that Products with a high degree of technological Convergence are preferred.

Convergence is also interesting from a managerial perspective. The people using these converged products will be using them to engage with Brands. Schau, Muñiz Jr., & Arnould have written a fascinating article in this month’s Journal of Marketing titled How Brand Community Practice Create Value.In a broad piece of qualitative research that looked at brand communities as diverse as Apple Newton, Garmin GPS, and the Xena Warrior Princess TV Show they have identified 12 value creating practices that included ‘grooming’ where communities share how to care for your product, ‘justifying’ that creates social proof about why the brand is a good buy, ‘badging’ where models and versions of products are built up like an ancestry.

The killer observations for me by the authors are their identification of 4 strategic themes that need blending for effective community value creation, and significantly digital technologies are at the heart:

Social Networking that facilitates stuff such as welcoming, and governing.

Impression Management that facilitates justifying and evagenlising.

Community Engagement that facilitates knowledge sharing.

Brand Use that facilitates tips and tricks.

I like their ideas because they view the thing systemically. Each theme is interconnected and interdependent. It is also clear that digital technology means that creating communities and keeping them alive is much easier these days than in the past. So maybe technology is changing the way we think about Marketing afterall, not necessarily introducing anything new but foregrounding something that might have been easier to ignore in the past? If you can get your hands on a copy of these articles I recommend you do so.

Is Marketing Wicked?

Depending on who you are this question will probably mean something different to you.

A person who was born in the 1990s might think I was asking if marketing was a ‘good thing’, perhaps a cutting edge career, something to really aspire to. On the other hand someone who has doubts about the value of consumersim and the ethics of materialism might think I was asking about the moral basis of marketing thought and practice. The sort of concerns that can be found on websites such as Marketing Ethics and Criticism

Both are likely to disappointed. The question is really about how marketing is understood by marketing professionals and the notion of ‘wicked’ refers to the types of wicked, complex and ambiguous phenomena first characterised by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in their 1973 paper Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.

A crucial aspect of their idea is that ‘wickedness’ isn’t about how difficult something is per se. The opposite of wicked problems are tame problems. Tame problems are often hard to solve but they use familiar tried and tested problem solving methods to crack them. The example that is often given is the game of Chess. Chess presents ‘tame’ problems. The challenges presented might be difficult but how the pieces move, and how to solve the challenges is essentially the same time after time. This is the sort of thinking that people use when they’ve had alot of experience in a particular business sector and are often heard to claim that they know everything there is to know about the business. Wicked problems can’t be solved in the same way. They involve situations with multiple causes, they have multiple explanations provided by stakeholders with different opinions and values and according to Michael Pacanowsky in his article Team Tools for Wicked Problems they “involve us in dialogue that includes our definition of the problem, the algorithm we try to invent or employ, the information we consider relevant, the solution we find, and the outcomes we ultimately achieve. Wicked problems necessarily have an interative nature to them”

Classic Marketing Management schools us in the belief that the business environment whilst dynamic and changeable, can be tamed and controlled through the application of the principles of ‘scientific management’. The ideas of Rittel and Webber imply that the business environment isn’t ‘tame’ (routine and familiar problems and solutions). Marketing Executives are constantly faced with ‘wicked’ (supriseful, complex, unfamiliar situations requiring innovative and imaginative solutions) too. And they look like this…

1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.(we can’t simply say it’s a sales problem, a pricing problem, a distribution problem etc)

2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule. (unlike tame problems where you clearly know when you’ve ‘cracked’ it, for e.g.we can’t say for certain that ‘we have sorted our Service Marketing strategy now’)

3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but better or worse. (this implies power and politics have a role to play in decision making too)

4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.(obviously a worry for those who depend on the scientfic method of experimentation to test and control variables in order to inform their decision making)

5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly. (So if we change our sales structure we have changed our business environment and we now have to deal with a new reality)

6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.

7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique.

8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.(forget looking for a root cause, its impossible to find)

9. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution.(what glasses are you wearing? the world through brass glasses is very different to the world through silver and gold glasses)

10. The planner has no right to be wrong (planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate).

With these things in mind, now think about the classic linear rational approach to Marketing Planning that is put forward in the majority of standard text books. The marketing plan is ‘sold’ as a solution for structuring complexity. A method that if correctly followed will reveal the best course of action. All you have to do is plug data into the planning algorthim and out pops the solution!

Business Schools are churning out marketing managers bred on this rational systematic problem solving methodolgy, but as Pacanowsky says “Linear problem-solving methods, with the attendant assumptions they make about problem definition, information, and solution, are often insufficient for the task” Might this be the reason that Marketing Plans are merely ‘shelf-ware’ once they have been written? They don’t actually solve the problems they were intended to solve!

To end on a contemporary note. Take a look at how marketeers are trying to understand and make sense of Social Media. There are multiple explanations, its not easy to pin down, some people are trying to ‘tame’ it by fitting into classic processes. Often people will tell you just ‘how complicated Social Media is and hard it is to explain to the CEO what it is all about’. Its difficult to test and measure. Its in a perpetual state of trial and error. No one really has the answer.

Marketing is wicked, isn’t it!

Links to articles (will need journal subscriptions):
Team Tools for Wicked Problems
Strategy As A Wicked Problem

Is Selling The New Marketing?

Pick up any classic marketing text and one of the first things you are told is that ‘marketing isn’t selling’.
Not only that you are told that selling only has a bit part in the whole marketing performance, and that marketing done properly means selling isn’t actually required.

On the other hand, walk into any business and get talking to the staff and one of the first things you are often told is that ‘this is a people business’. That people develop trust between one another and that they buy from people who help them solve their problems.

Doesn’t this strike you as strange? In practice, the arts of social influence, relationship building and service are seen as key. In text books these very same things are relegated to a mere feature of the marketing mix.

Robert Louis Stevenson said “Every one lives by selling something”
It is how things are made to happen. Its how people are persuaded and convinced of the benefits of value propositions. In mass consumer markets selling is invariably the responsibility of marketing communications in business to business it is what happens face to face.

Skilled selling is a strategic necessity for business. Skilled sales people can differentiate your company/brand from the competition.

The September 2009 edition of the European Journal of Marketing carries a special series of articles themed under the title, ‘Sales Evolution and Revolution: The Sales Function in the 21st Century’

Over the last few years Sales has been rediscovered and its strategic importance re-stated. Its no longer necessary to keep sales at arms length as the domain of silver tongued masters of deception. The province of mere functionaries who do the bidding of ‘marketing’. Selling is increasingly being recognised for its strategic value creating impact (see Harvard Business Review special edition on Sales- 84 7/8 2006 -The Top Line by Thomas Stewart)

Susi Gieger and Paulo Guenzi in their European Journal of Marketing article say that academic interest in selling is moving on from what Williams and Plouffe (2007) classed as concerns with motivation, the Saxe & Weitz SOCO scale, relationship building and trust. Most of these issues are now well taped by practioners. Academics need to help in other areas such as scenario, sense-making and forecasting capabilities.

So what is happening with this changing attitude towards Selling then? Storbacka, Ryals, Davies and Nenonen say that businesses now see Sales as a process not just a function, that it is integrated rather than isolated, and crucially strategic not simply operational.

Sales people might be last step of the getting a product to market but they are frequently the first step in getting the market to the organisation. Classic marketing explains what happens in linear rational terms. Everything is about getting your ‘ducks in a row’. Now that might be fine for creating planning documents but it doesn’t reflect what happens in reality. A more systemic view seems more appropriate. Seeing things this way emphasises inter-dependencies and the simultaneous nature of ‘doing business’. As Peter Senge explains, thinking is circles rather than lines is more like reality.

Are you sold?

Why Won’t Sainbury’s Let Me Alone?

A friend recently reported a shopping experience irritation during a visit to Sainbury’s. In the middle of a rush shopping trip she was stopped hassled by a member of Sainbury’s staff asking if she could if she was adequately insured.

All in the name of service no doubt. Or is it? When does a marketing philosophy become a marketing mantra? When does a marketing philosophy become a convenient gloss for the real intention of the organisation?

Kurt Lewin said “There is nothing so practical as a good theory”
In other words ideas drive actions.

So what is the idea that is driving the action of Sainbury’s? Back in 2004 Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch wrote an article in the Journal of Marketing called “Evolving To A New Dominant Logic of Marketing”. In this article they pulled together streams of thought that had been developing over previous decades concerning ‘Service Marketing’ (Gronross et al).

This ‘theory’ has sat in the background quietly influencing marketing strategy and justifying marketing actions. We no longer trade ‘goods’ they argue we are focussed on “intangible resources, the co-creation of value and relationships” So the man in aisle isn’t ‘selling’ anymore he’s establishing a ‘service relationship’ in order that value can be co-created between the moment your tin of tuna is taken from the shelf and placed in the trolley!

Sainsbury’s have evidently bought into the ‘service dominant logic’. Or have they? The rhetoric is about service the reality is exchange. I have something that I want you to buy from me. You have money in your wallet and I want it to be mine, all mine. The ‘sales dominant logic’ of Sainbury’s simply can’t be hidden from view that easily. Psychologically it’s an ideal situation to sell to somebody. The rationalising defences are down because you are focussing on your regular house hold shopping and the distraction of the service stalker makes you amenable vulnerable to sales messages (clever! see Pratkanis The Science of Social Influence)

Surely when someone goes shopping its in their time? What right has a retailer to take your time and take advantage of you simply because you are on their premises? The argument that it simply making you aware of additional services seems rather hollow.

Now, as part of the Brass Glasses service to readers, I’d like to offer you a solution to the in store stalking problem. Of course as critical thinkers you’ll know what I’m up to. So here it is:

The amazing new Garbo badge. Imagine walking around Sainsbury’s without interruption, simply wear this badge and Sainsbury’s staff will know that you “vont to be let alone”

Update October 2009:
Witnessed an OAP approached by an in store sales person selling insurance. The chap was a bit confused. Hardly surprising he was doing his shopping not thinking about insurance. The gentleman was then obliged to discuss his financial affairs in the aisle next to the tinned tuna. How lacking in empathy and courtesy.

I believe this is an unwarranted intrusion into shopper privacy and just because you have walked onto the premises doesn’t mean you should be a target for unsolicited sales propositions.

This is something different I don’t want to try thanks!

Critical Marketing

How seriously do marketing practioners question the assumptions they act upon? I don’t mean questioning the effectiveness of the tools and techniques they use, I mean the very foundations of contemporary practice. Notions such as the necessity for competition, the value and benefit of technological applications such as CRM and Social Media, the logic of materialism and consumerism.

How many marketing people believe the purpose of their role is to become proficient in the language and jargon of the profession and proficient in understanding and applying the ‘given’ generic tools of basic marketing education, and how many critically question the value of the approach and tools for people organisations and society?

So what? well perhaps facing up to these questions might begin to help ‘marketing’ influence and persuade people of its value.

Marketing people seem to be very good at defining other people’s Value Propositions and remarkably poor at convincingly articulating their own.