Do You Think Outside The Box?

Think Outside The Box by reasonablerobinson
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If you have ever played buzzword bingo then I’m sure you will be very familiar with the now cliched term ‘think outside the box’.

Like lots of management ideas the phrase points to an important insight about the way we can all become locked into routine patterns of thinking.  Gareth Morgan calls these our psychic prisons, Social Theorist Anthony Giddens  alerts us to operating within the limits of our knowledgabilty, and Chris Argyis  describes the distinction between single loop and double loop problem solving, in which the solutions to our problems frequently lie outside of the system where they occur.

Thinking, whether inside or outside the box is often belittled by practicing managers. Often they will say they can be doing something more useful than thinking. I find that rather strange because every action is based on an idea (however implicit)

Developing your thinking is the primary purpose of all higher education business studies programmes. This is not always made explicit. Often Business School prospectii simply mention what courses are (their features) rather than explain what the courses do for the student (their benefits)

Many people have no idea that purpose of business studies degrees has been carefully thought through by The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (who? I here you say) and The Association of Business Schools.

By studying for a business degree you are embarking on course of personal development that will guide you in four key areas:

i – reflective mindset – recognise assumptions and learn from experience

ii – change master – recognise and manage ambiguity, competing demands, and facilitate change

iii – effective manager – recognise and choose best courses of action amongst alternatives

iv- analytical thinker – deeply understand the nature of business phenomena

Combined,  these four areas together with the experience of study itself will help anyone develop a capability for thinking outside the box. So whatever business degree you choose whether that’s a bachelor’s degree, a specialist MA or Msc or a generalist MBA thinking outside the box comes as standard.

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!