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Featured Links: Measurement

	The relevance of research in marketing

	Falling trade barriers worldwide, the global convergence of media, information technology advancements and other sweeping changes have created significantly altered market circumstances for many businesses. Inevitably, there is widespread concern among both academics and practising marketers that academic research in marketing as it stands does not sufficiently support firms confronting today’s hostile business conditions. The associated intellectual challenges facing the field have never been greater, and integrating academic theory and marketing practice will doubtless continue to be an extremely challenging undertaking. Nonetheless, at a minimum academic research in marketing must keep pace with business developments as the twenty-first century unfolds, by ceaselessly seeking answers to new questions from multiple, traditional and contemporary directions. Enhancing the relevance and rigour of our research in order to arrive at better explanations of contemporary and prospective marketing problems and issues is central to the continued development of the discipline. Correspondingly, a recent survey of academic marketers identified relevance and rigour as being among the most pressing issues facing marketing theory today. Marketing experts support this observation. There was a recent brainstorming session aimed at isolating important directions for research in the marketing field organised by Cardiff Business School in conjunction with the UK Academy of Marketing. Highlights from the discussion include: 1. Cross-border buyer-seller interactions. There is considerable scope for investigating “real interaction” in multicultural relationships of this kind. Specifically, as present marketplace realities make forging long-term channel partnerships neither an easy nor certain process, it is important for research to examine the practice, character and management of on-going negotiations between partners. 2. New business models and their impact on international marketing. Due to the importance of the Internet in enabling companies to tap global markets, together with movement towards a borderless world in which markets, industries and the media are global, cyberspace is growing in importance vis-a` -vis physical space. Not only does the Internet play a direct role in increasing international trade, it is also a channel through which a company can collect a large amount of relevant data regarding local customers. There are, therefore, significant implications for the way businesses collect and analyse data on global markets. 3. Market fragmentation versus globalisation and supranational organisations. An important research direction centres on what can be termed the “fragvergence” issue, referring to the notion that there is simultaneous global convergence and fragmentation of tastes. Not only does this challenge basic assumptions about how markets function and evolve, the fact that different industries, geographic/product markets and types of consumer could experience different degrees of fragvergence, makes this highly problematical as far as integrated global marketers are concerned. To view a full paper on this topic, visit the TMCA Member Center and click "Library." The title of the white paper is "In search of relevance and rigour for research in marketing," and is available through TMCA's licensing agreement with Emerald Group Publishing.
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