Editorial

Citation

Crosier, K. (2007), "Editorial", Marketing Intelligence & Planning, Vol. 25 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/mip.2007.02025aaa.001

Editorial

Welcome to Volume 25, and to 2007. It is a curious sensation to be writing that greeting before the leaves are off the trees, even in November at latitude 60 degrees north.

Never – they say – begin with an apology. Nevertheless, we owe one to Olof Holm, whose application of marketing communications to management-staff relationships on board a Swedish Navy submarine was published in issue number five last year. Juggling unexpectedly numerous manuscripts from Sweden or based on Swedish case histories, I accidentally transferred him in my Editorial for that issue from Stockholm University Business School to Växjö University, even issuing stern warnings to the publisher's production editors about the spelling of the wrong institution.

This mistake gives me the opportunity to add one comment to what I said about his contribution then. Because the application was so unusual, both reviewers had difficulty judging the methodology objectively. But I am an enthusiast for the transfer of principles and practice beyond conventional boundaries, and was intrigued by this case in point. The author patiently revised his manuscript four times, and was duly rewarded when, after his article eventually appeared, he was invited to present the methodology and findings to his own university's Department of Ethnology.

That instance of interdisciplinary intercourse bring us to the first Viewpoint for 2007. Mike Saren, Professor of Marketing at the Management Centre of the University of Leicester in the UK, is one of the “Group of Six” marketing academics who scrutinise our discipline from a sociological, cultural and even anthropological viewpoint, and in the process prefer qualitative analysis to quantitative. It should come as no surprise that they are all British, and are by inclination much closer to the relationship-focused “Nordic School” than to the modelling and hypothesis-testing that characterises much of current American-influenced marketing research.

His thought-provoking piece contains the germ of an explanation for the transatlantic shift from one dominant paradigm to another. He remarks that he has always been puzzled by the militarization of marketing vocabulary. He could also have mentioned the papers on the Chinese art of warfare that crop up so regularly in the marketing literature. I have frequently deplored this orientation too, because I believe it to be counterproductive, but never been surprised. Having had a previous career with an Italian multinational in the USA, I know that American sales managers of the twentieth century treated selling as a competitive activity akin to sport, and that sport in America is generally thinly disguised battle. From gridiron football coaches, we learn that “the best defense is offense”; from our soccer pundits, we hear of “the beautiful game” (whatever the actual mayhem on the field). Green Bay Packers vs Boca Juniors. Aggressiveness vs assertiveness. Is marketing about doing to, or doing with? Read this Viewpoint, and think.

By the way, I feel duty bound to object to the inclusion of “marketing and intelligence” in his inventory of militaristic concepts. Intelligencer was a newspaper title that had no evident connection with spying, after all. But, as a UK citizen, I suppose I have to admit to knowing what the M and I stand for in “MI5” and “MI6”.

A different list of his also set me thinking. The “core functions” of marketing included three of McCarthy's four Ps but excluded pricing, the perennial Cinderella. Does anyone in our discipline take any real interest in that crucial element of the producer-consumer interface these days, beyond textbook prescriptions for the setting of the asking price? Or do we leave that to our colleagues in the economics and accounting disciplines? Are not the soft cues offered by the price of a product or service at least as much part of relationship marketing as place and promotion?

Before we finally move on to the authors of the other six articles here, let me remind you of a previous Viewpoint (Vol. 24 No. 6, 2006, pp. 547-51), in which Planning Director Nick Southgate asked, “Why is it that marketing practitioners so rarely turn to their academic colleagues' wisdom?”. A major part of his answer is that the density of many papers in academic journals can make it seem too much effort to do so. However, an increasing number of marketing people will have studied the discipline formally at university or college before practising it – or so we hope. But wait; Saren's analysis of the state of the art reminds us that the altogether more accessible student textbooks are teaching the application to practice of theories and principles that have fallen out of step with the changes in the world of consumption since they were promulgated. Who is writing the accessible classroom texts and populist airport-lounge titles that will move the work of the authors cited here into the mental sets of the next generation of marketing planners?

Professor Peter Jones is Deputy Head of the Business School at the University of Gloucester, in England, Daphne Comfort is Research Administrator there and Professor David Hillier is a specialist in urban geography at the University of Glamorgan, in Wales. Their article on corporate social responsibility, in the context of retailing, is the first of three to touch one what Saren's Viewpoint calls “the rise and rise of relationship marketing”. Note the 44-strong list of references, of which only three pre-date 2000. Many originate in organisational, professional and private sources (no less valuable or relevant for that), so URLs are provided. The authors analyse the corporate publications of the UK's top ten retailers, and report the results of observing the in-store promotions by means of which their stores in the medium-sized UK town of Cheltenham communicate their corporate social responsibility credentials. The details are exhaustive indeed, but provide intelligence-gatherers and retail planners with an excellent substitute for possibly impractical first-hand observation and personal experience. They are also unavoidable ethnocentric, but most non-British readers should have little difficulty relating the findings their own environments.

Dr Roger Brooksbank and Dr David Taylor are Associate Professors of Marketing at the Waikato Management School, New Zealand. The field study they describe here is the latest phase in their longitudinal study of medium-sized manufacturing firms in the UK, conducted over two decades. Interim findings were reported in Marketing Intelligence & Planning four years ago (Brooksbank and Taylor, Vol. 20 No. 7, 2002, pp. 452-61). For this study, they carried out face-to-face interviews with senior marketing executives in matched pairs of higher and lower performers, competing head to head in specific markets. Questions related to four “key marketing success factors” previously identified – marketing research, situation analysis, customer value and marketing information systems – which are self-evidently relevant to intelligence and planning. The findings confirm the logical but not necessarily expected fact that higher performers implemented all four more thoroughly and skilfully than did their lower-performing competitors.

We stay in the Southern Hemisphere, with Dr Raguragavan Ganeshasundaram, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, and Professor Nadine Henley, Director, both in the Centre for Applied Social Marketing Research at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. Accepting the logical and widely accepted (though in fact untested) premise that the gathering of marketing intelligence has a positive effect on business performance, they investigate the effect of the type of research used to gather it. After categorising the methodological bases of a large number of market research studies conducted by or for companies in New Zealand, they administered the classic questionnaire developed by Diamantopoulos and Souchon, appropriately tailored to the specific context, to one nominated respondent from each company. Thorough statistical analysis led them to conclude that those concentrating on “decision research” as distinct from “background” or “mixed” scored higher than the others with respect to three of four standard performance measures, and performed strongly overall. Their conclusion is that managers responsible for designing and commissioning market research projects may need to modify their mindsets, away from the popular background-dominated model to the potentially more rewarding decision orientation.

Still down under, Associate Professor Suku Bhaskaran is Director of the Food Marketing Research Unit at Victoria University in Melbourne, and Nishal Sukumaran is a Malaysian civil engineering graduate on the part-time MBA at the Melbourne Business School, where he is “Student Ambassador” as I write this. They have collaborated here to review almost a 100 past studies of country-of-origin effect, with the aim of identifying the reasons behind the noticeably contradictory conclusions drawn with respect to its impact on consumers' beliefs and intentions. Their conclusion is that methodological and contextual variation is the root cause. Since, this is a clear obstacle to theoretical development, they propose a more rigorous framework for future studies. A case history of the Norwegian seafood industry's export efforts in Taiwan is the offered as an example of exploiting country-of-origin to good effect. I was lucky to be able to call on an expert in the field to be one of the reviewers of this paper. He commented that, while many other researchers have already analysed the body of research critically, none had done so as thoroughly as these authors, to the best of his knowledge. The importance of country-of-origin to strategic marketing planning will clearly continue to increase, as globalisation of production and consumption proceed apace, and this review has pointed to the need for much more disciplined research in future.

If I may add one comment about the studies reviewed, which the authors recognise but do not comment on, it is the disturbing tendency of too many academic researchers to draw general conclusions from studies and experiments in which the sample is drawn from their own undergraduate or postgraduate students, who are routinely rewarded for their participation with course credits. This crucial methodological detail is typically buried in the text – deliberately, one has to suspect. Submissions to Marketing Intelligence & Planning are not immune, and have survived to publication only when a case has been made for the sample in the context. Otherwise, the researchers in question are engaged in methodological sleight-of-hand, and readers stand to be deceived if they are not alert.

Like Brooksbank and Taylor, Dr Mark Durkin, Head of the School of Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Strategy at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, reports on a longitudinal study, an earlier phase of which was the subject of a previous article in Marketing Intelligence & Planning (Durkin and Howcroft, Vol. 21 No. 1, 2003, pp. 61-71). Building on the findings of a first stage consisting of a small number of in-depth with specialist managers in retail banks in four countries, and taking his methodological lead from the relevant literature, he constructed a questionnaire to explore the views of customers who habitually conducted their transactions online about the role and importance of face-to-face contact with bank staff. The number of responses was large, but represented only 10 per cent of the sampling frame. With that proviso, multiple regression analysis suggested that the perceived need for support and reassurance increased with the complexity of the operation. At the most complex level, personal “coaching” in online procedures was desirable, perhaps even taking place in the customer's home. The implications for customer relationship planning are clear.

Dr Nelson Ndubisi is Associate Professor in the School of Business of Monash University's Malaysian campus. His research also concerns banking, a field in which he has past working experience. The topic of his article is the relationship between retail banks and their customers, but this time not online, and the study it reports is likewise the latest phase of a continuing project. In volume 24 issue 1, 2006 (pp. 48-61), he discussed the influence of gender on customer loyalty to Malaysian banks. Here, he uses regression analysis of data gathered from customers by self-completion questionnaire to assess the impact of four enabling conditions of relationship marketing, finding that they all predict a significant proportion of observed variances, and are strongly interrelated. His conclusion is that customer loyalty can be created, reinforced and maintained by building trust, demonstrating commitment, communicating effectively and resolving conflicts before they become problems. Again, you hardly need me to spell out the practical managerial implications of what seems an intuitively generalisable finding.

It is never boring to compile the contents of an issue and comment on them. But the task this time has been greatly enlivened by the sheer geographical and cultural cross-currents in the selection. Two New Zealanders of British origin question marketing managers in the UK. Two Australians, one a Sri Lankan who did his doctoral research in New Zealand, question managers in New Zealand. Two more Australians, of Indian ethnic origin, tell us about Norwegians exporting to Taiwan. Customer loyalty in Malaysia is investigated by a faculty member of a fourth Australian university, whose surname is redolent of Africa. A survey of online banking in Northern Ireland originates in a study also encompassing Sweden and the USA. The author of the Viewpoint has a surname that is by no means uncommon in Sweden: Sarén. And as for Crosier ... But wait; order is restored by Peter Jones, who may or may not have been among the hundreds (or was it thousands?) of Joneses who entered the Guinness Book of Records by congregating in Wales last week!

Keith Crosier