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May 1997 SIG Newsletter

SIG(NIFICANT) RESEARCH NEWSMay 1997

The Marketing Research Special Interest Group (MR SIG) has grown considerably since our first newsletter was published in May 1996. We are the fourth-largest (of nineteen) SIGs, with almost 350 members. Thank you for joining or renewing your membership in the SIG in the past year.

Please be part of the business meeting and reception to be held during the Summer AMA Conference in Chicago (Lincolnshire Room, 6th floor). Mark your calendar for Sunday, August 3, from 5 to 6 p.m. In the meantime, learn more about the SIG from our home page on t he World Wide Web: HTTP://WWW.CBA.UNL.EDU/ MKT/MKT/MRSIG.HTML (Thanks to Dwayne Ball, University of Nebraska, for setting up and maintaining this site.)

Current MR SIG Officers and Call For Nominations

Past Chair, Roland Rust (Vanderbilt University)

Chair, George Franke (University of Alabama)

Chair Elect, Naveen Donthu (Georgia State University)

Vice Chair (Conference Sessions), Wagner Kamakura (University of Pittsburgh)

Vice Chair (Public Relations), Praveen Kopalle (Dartmouth College)

Webmaster, Dwayne Ball (University of Nebraska)

Treasurer, Doug Bowman (Purdue University)

Newsletter Editor, Sylvia Keyes (Bridgewater State College)

If you are interested in serving as an officer in 1998, please contact Naveen Donthu by June 25 (ndonthu @ gsu.edu or fax 404-651-4198). Send him a brief description of your background and qualifications for the position(s) that interest(s) you. The nominating committee will consider applications and prepare a slate for candidates for each position.

Research in Marketing Research: The State of the Art

Wagner Kamakura has organized an outstanding pre-conference session for those attending the Summer AMA Conference. Plan to arrive at the Chicago Marriott in time for the following presentations on Saturday, August 2 (Denver/ Houston Room, 5th floor). Attendance is free and no preregistration is required.

1:00-1:30

The Robust Performance of Self-Explicated Preference Structure Measurement
V. Srinivasan - Stanford University
1:30-2:00
When to Target the Majority Instead of Innovators in a New Product Launch
Vijay Mahajan - University of Texas at Austin
2:00-2:30
Issues in the Pricing of On-line Information Products
P.K. Kannan - University of Maryland
2:30-3:00
Estimating Brand Loyalty via Latent-Class Models: Fact or Fiction
William R. Dillon - Southern Methodist University
3:00-3:30
On the Identification of Market Segments
Greg Allenby - Ohio State University
3:30-4:00
How to Find Latent Structures When the Data are Fuzzy
Roland T. Rust - Vanderbilt University

Winter AMA Event: Reflections of Former JM and JMR Editors

The MR SIG sponsored a well-attended special session at the 1997 Winter AMA Educators’ Conference in St. Petersburg Beach, Florida. Chaired by Naveen Donthu, the session f eatured reminiscences of four past editors: Rajan Varadarajan of JM and Gil Churchill, Mike Houston, and Bart Weitz of JMR.

Some common denominators and major lessons of their experiences include the following:

• Editing a major journal is a wonderful, broadening, time-consuming experience.

• Journal editors have less power than one would think, since they can’t dictate what is submitted or what reviewers will say.

• The reviewing process has become too adversarial. Reviewers tend to dwell on shortcomings; too few reviewers point out the unique contributions a manuscript makes. Unfortunately, exhortations to change the process continually fall on deaf ears.

Asked to comment on his impact on JMR, Churchill said it was the measurement orientation. His first issue as editor was the special issue on measurement (February 1979), and he started a measurement abstracts section that ran several years. Today, though, measurement has become rote: Researchers go through an automatic set of calculations, often without ever really stepping back to assess the construct and the process. Cronbach’s alpha, item-total correlations, etc., are diagnostics, not substitutes for thinking.

Weitz echoed this concern, stating that we’ve replaced common sense with Lisrel in developing measures. He also suggested that researchers in marketing are not addressing big problems, important problems that people care about. With respect to the review process, he noted that only 1 out of 900 manuscripts during his editorship was conditionally accepted on first submission!

Houston discussed trends in methods and theory during his term as editor emergence of scanner data and large datasets, greater use of analytic and game-theoretic models, a growing body of channels and strategy research. He tried to reinforce JMR as a marketing journal, concerned with implications for the body and practice of marketing knowledge.

With JM entering its 60th year during Varadarajan’s editorship, he viewed his term as the temporary custodianship of a cherished possesion of the discipline. In assessing the contribution of a paper, he considered whether it might change how a manager, researcher, or teacher acts. Unfortunately, "science has no compassion" -- tremendous effort in conducting a study cannot overcome fatal flaws.

During an open discussion period, the "so what" question was reiterated. The editors also advised researchers to make their papers readable -- use clear language, avoid unnecessary jargon, etc. Authors who make a distinct contribution in a readable manuscript have a much b etter chance of acceptance at JM and JMR than those who don’t.

Congratulations to MR SIG Officers

• Naveen Donthu has received the 1997 Georgia State University Outstanding Faculty Achievement Award. This is a university-wide award based on research productivity, teaching effectiveness, and service contributions.

• George Franke won the Journal of Advertising Best Paper Award for a meta-analysis of the information content of advertising, coauthored with Avery M. Abernethy (Summer 1996).

• Sylvia Keyes won the Hugh G. Wales Faculty Advisor Award for her work with the Bridgewater collegiate AMA chapter for the second time in three years (1995 and 1997).

• Wagner Kamakura has been named the first chair holder of the Thomas Marshall Chair in Marketing at the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh.

More Kudos

One of the goals of the MR SIG is to recognize distinguished contributions and contributors o the field of marketing research. In 1996, the SIG established the Gilbert A. Churchill, Jr., Award for Lifetime Achievement in Marketing Research. The first recipient of the award was Paul E. Green. The 1997 recipient is William D. Perreault, Jr., a distinguished scholar, former JMR editor, and well-known textbook author. The award will be presented to Bill at the 1997 Summer Educators’ Conference. (Bill’s humility will be put to the test in Chicago. As a perfect example of convergent validity, a completely independent selection process named him this year’s winner of the AMA/Irwin Award.)

The MR SIG has established another award to begin in 1997. The Don Lehmann Dissertation Award will be given to recognize the outstanding dissertation-based article appearing in the Journal of Marketing or the Journal of Marketing Research in the previous three years. The award will be presented to the dissertation author, who must be sole author or a coauthor of the published paper. His or her chair will be asked to certify that the article is indeed based on the author’s dissertation.

Nominations are sought for the best dissertation-based paper appearing in JM or JMR in 1994, 1995, or 1996. (Self-nominations are welcome.) Please send the full citation of the article to Naveen Donthu (ndonthu @ gsu.edu or FAX 404-651-4198) by June 15, 1997. Identify which paper author is the dissertation author, if necessary. The winning author will be determined by the MR SIG Awards Committee.

Research Perspectives: Cargo Cult Science

Useful material for a seminar on research methods can be found in Nobel-laureate Richard P. Feynman’s "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!" (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1985). In a chapter adapted from a Caltech commencement address, Feynman discusses the cargo cults that existed in the South Seas in the years after WWII. "During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas - he’s the controller - and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land."

Feynman calls for "scientific integrity ... a kind of utter honesty" in research. "If you make a theory ... and put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgments in one particular direction or another."

Researchers who aren’t willing to following Feynman’s advice may unknowingly be practicing cargo cult science.

Please contact Sylvia Keyes with material for future MR SIG newsletters. News, accomplishments, reviews, teaching tips, etc. are all welcome. E-mail, phone, or fax: SKEYES@bridgew.edu; phone 508-697-1200, extension 2470; fax 508-697-1729)

KUDOS, originally British university slang, from Greek kudos, glory, fame. Takes a singular verb: Kudos is due our award winners. (American Heritage Dictionary)