Spanning the Boundaries
I am deeply committed to maintaining and enhancing the position of Journal of Marketing Research (JMR) as a top journal in the marketing field. My vision for the journal is based on the fundamental premise that JMR should reflect the diversity of marketing as an academic field, with articles demonstrating different substantive, theoretical, and methodological approaches. This diversity makes the marketing field itself so exciting, and JMR should vigorously promote this excitement.
Nevertheless, it is customary for the new JMR editor to outline the types of papers he or she especially wants to encourage for submission. Needless to say, the ultimate goal is to publish high-quality, high-impact research, with important implications for managers, consumers, or public policy officials. Given the way both the academic field of marketing and marketing practice are evolving, I especially want to encourage the following type of papers, which represent different examples of “spanning the boundaries,” to enhance the impact of the research published in JMR.
“OUT-OF-THE-BOX” PAPERS
“Out-of-the-box” papers may address an area that has largely been ignored by prior researchers; they may pose and/or solve long-standing puzzles with clever methods and important implications; or they may provide robust, counterintuitive, or surprising results. Such work tends to yield papers that can be cited not only in academic journals but also in popular publications, such as the New York Times. These are papers with insights that are relevant to nonspecialists, not just to marketing academics.
There are many reasons to promote such papers. These include increasing the impact and relevance of research in marketing, helping nonspecialists better appreciate marketing and marketing research, and having more fun conducting and reading the research. However, and most important, such papers enable us to think out of the box; they lead us to new territories; they break the current boundaries of academic research in marketing; and they span the boundaries of academic researchers, practitioners, and nonspecialists.
INTERDISCIPLINARY PAPERS
The very nature of the marketing field is interdisciplinary. This provides the opportunity to use a multitude of theories and approaches in complementary ways to analyze the issues at hand. In this context, interdisciplinary papers can take multiple forms, from papers that blend economic, psychological, and marketing (and other) theories to aid the analysis to papers that blend, for example, behavioral methods with modeling methods. The goal is to break the boundaries between fields, such as behavioral and quantitative.
THEORY-DRIVEN EMPIRICAL PAPERS
Theory-driven empirical papers use theory to guide the empirical work rather than relying on ad hoc rationalizations. This type of work spans theory and empirical evidence.
Theory-Driven Empirical Modeling Work
The category of “theory-driven empirical modeling work” can be conceptualized to cover two classes of work. The first is empirical modeling work that uses a structural approach. This type of work is theory driven in the sense that it relies on economic and/or marketing theories of consumer or firm behavior to derive the econometric specifications that can be applied to the data. In this approach, because “one can assess the role of the behavioral assumptions in driving empirical findings, the appropriateness of these assumptions can be investigated. Consequently, the structural approach allows us to test the theories from which the models are derived and obtain behavioral predictions that are invariant to the effects of policy changes” (Chintagunta et al. 2006, p. 604).
A second form of theory-driven empirical modeling derives the empirical relationships it is testing from economic or marketing (or some other) theory, but it does not use an econometric specification derived directly from theory. Instead, such an approach tests the implications of the theory. Thus, it examines whether the data support the empirical relationships predicted by the theory and provides a preponderance of evidence that the estimated empirical relationship indeed arises from the theory to which it is attributed.
Theory-Driven Behavioral Work
This form of theory-driven empirical work tests the theoretical premises proposed by using a series of experiments. Such experiments may take place in the lab, the field, or both and focus on uncovering the processes that underlie agents’ decision making (e.g., consumers, managers) and choices.
PAPERS THAT COMBINE AND/OR USE
INTERESTING AND NOVEL DATA SETS
Researchers today have access to richer data sets than ever before. Not only are diverse forms of transactional data now available, but it is also easier to gather data through field experiments. In addition, even if natural experiments are still somewhat rare, they provide excellent opportunities to understand the underlying causalities better. Natural experiments are getting a great deal of attention in fields such as economics, but there are still few applications in marketing. Given the availability of various data sources and new approaches to combining multiple data sources, it is possible to explore new territories and break the current boundaries.
CONCLUSION
Note that these four types of papers are not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, although these are the types of papers I will likely pay particular attention to, JMR will be open to a wide variety of behavioral, methodological, and analytical and empirical modeling work that may not be covered under these four points.
Finally, Joel Huber has done an excellent job as the editor in chief, and I am truly grateful to him for all the help he has provided me during the transition process. I am excited to have the opportunity to head the journal for the next three years. I will have the pleasure of working with an excellent advisory editorial review board, as well as a great editorial review board. I am also looking forward to working closely with the terrific staff at the American Marketing Association, especially Nicki Augustyn, assistant to the JMR editor, and Francesca V. Cooley, managing editor, as well as my wonderful and diverse group of associate editors, who have specializations ranging from analytical/empirical modeling, to behavioral decision theory/consumer behavior, to strategy. I am looking forward to receiving your submissions.
REFERENCES
Chintagunta, Pradeep, Tülin Erdem, Peter Rossi, and Michel Wedel (2006), “Structural Modeling in Marketing: Review and Assessment,” Marketing Science, 25 (6), 604–616.
Tülin Erdem is Leonard N. Stern Professor of Business Administration and Professor of Marketing, Stern School of Business, New York University (e-mail: terdem@stern.nyu.edu).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I benefited a great deal from my discussions with Roni Shachar on spanning and breaking the boundaries of academic research. Many thanks also to Gavan Fitzsimons, Joel Huber, Don Lehmann, Russ Winer, and Florian Zettelmeyer for their input.