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November 1996 SIG NewsletterSIG(NIFICANT) RESEARCH NEWS
November 1996 Reactions and Comments on the Gilbert A. Churchill, Jr. Award for “Lifetime Achievement in Marketing Research”By
Sylvia Keyes During the awards luncheon in August, it was a special thrill to watch people go to the podium and receive in person the recognition that we coordinated through e-mail. Gil Churchill, for whom we named the Gilbert A. Churchill, Jr. Award for “Lifetime Achievement in Marketing Research,” and Paul E. Green, the first recipient, were brief in remarks at the confer-ence. Thus, as editor of the SIGnificant Marketing Research Newsletter, I asked each of them if they would be willing to respond to questions for publication. As seems to be their congenial and cooperative nature, they were both enthusiastic and agreeable. Their responses to three questions follow: To
Gil Churchill:
on
a personal level, what does having this award named for you mean?
And, to Paul Green: on a personal level, what does receiving the
first Churchill award for Lifetime Achievement in Marketing Research
mean? Gil Churchill’s Comments:As you might expect, I was delighted, although overwhelmed, when I received the telephone call from Roland Rust asking for my permission for the marketing research Special Interest Group to name their career achievement award after me. It was such an honor to be thought of in this way by one’s professional peers that I almost didn’t know what to say, but did manage to say yes. To think that one’s contributions to the marketing discipline will be recognized annually when the award is presented is a great honor and it was with great humility that I accepted the recognition. It was also my great privilege to present the first award to Paul Green, a person whose name is synonymous with excellence in marketing research. Paul’s contributions to the field are legendary. His name is closely associated with several techniques in common use today in the practice of marketing research, including perceptual mapping and conjoint analysis. Paul has been a leader in not only introducing these techniques to the field, but also with his cutting edge research that addresses the issues and their application. Conjoint analysis is used today, for example by almost all of the Fortune 500 companies and by a number of other organizations as well to assess customer preferences for various product and service alternatives. Similarly, perceptual mapping is used by many organizations to get a sense for their competitive positionings. Throughout his career, Paul has maintained an active program of scholarship. To say that he has been a prolific author is to understate his productivity. He is the author or co-author of 15 books, 5 monographs, and over 200 articles. In a recent study of the top 35 U.S. business schools, he was named the highest ranked researcher in marketing, based on a composite index of citations, publications, and peer ratings. One measure of the esteem in which he is held is his receipt in 1991 of the AMA/Irwin Marketing Educator of the Year award. This award is a career achievement award and is the most prestigious honor granted in the discipline. He also received the Academy of Marketing Science Distinguished Educator of the Year award in 1992, also a lifetime achievement award. His other recognitions include the Parlin Award for the Advancement of Science in Marketing, the Paul D. Converse award, the AMA’s Alpha Kappa Psi award (three times), and the O’Dell best JMR article award. To recognize his many contributions to the Journal of Marketing Research, the JMR in 1996 established the Paul Green Award which is to be given to the article that “exhibits the most potential to contribute significantly to the practice of marketing research and research in marketing.” Given how Paul’s research has so significantly impacted the practice of marketing research, the Paul Green award could not be more appropriately targeted. Another thing that was especially gratifying about the presentation of the first Gilbert A. Churchill, Jr. Award is that Paul is one of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. He is sincere, personal and kind, a person who goes out of his way to help others, whether by offering helpful comments on someone’s research ideas, reviewing a working paper, or by offering an encouraging word. Current and future scholars would do well to emulate Paul’s examples. One can be very successful while continuing to be a kind, caring person. Be excited by ideas and always try to do quality work when investigating them. Maintain an active program of scholarship and research and the rest will take care of itself. Paul E. Green’s Comments:Every few years or so the Annual Summer Educators' Meeting of the American Marketing Association is held in the beautiful and vibrant city of San Diego. For me this particular trip was something special. I was fortunate in being selected as the first recipient of the new Gilbert A. Churchill, Jr. Award for Lifetime Achievement in Marketing Research. I was delighted to receive this reward for two reasons. First, the Award honors Gil Churchill, a true scholar and gentleman, for his lifetime achievement and service to the field of marketing research. Second, as its first recipient, I am living proof that persistence and durability can reap rewards both in heaven and on earth. I first started working in marketing and business research in the beginning of 1950, after stints in the U.S. Navy and the University of Pennsylvania. Sun Oil Company was the dubious beneficiary of my newly developed collegiate skills. My bosses complained much less than they had a right to as I moved on to other marketing research jobs in a local Philadelphia-area steel company and E.I. du Pont de Nemours in Wilmington. I found that my formal training in statistics, mathematics, and economics helped quite a bit in the development and explication of tools and techniques for marketing and operations research. In 1962 I left the tumultuous world of industry to settle in the equally tumultuous world of academe, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. I’ve been there ever since. During my early years in Wharton’s Marketing Department, I had the good fortune of becoming a student and close friend of Wroe Alderson, the intellectual monarch of marketing research (except that Wroe, a Quaker, had little time for monarchies). I quickly learned the value of continued formal training in research methods and the importance of developing and applying tools that have practical consequences for marketing research suppliers and business firms. It’s now 46 years later. I don’t think that I’ve changed my general perspective very much since the early days at Wharton. My mind’s a bit foggier and my step’s a bit slower, but the fun and excitement of doing marketing research has not abated. It’s still a thrill, after all these years, to see one of my journal articles or books in print. As all researchers quickly learn, research is a collaborative enterprise. Over the years I have been blessed with a long list of highly talented research collaborators–business executives, former Ph.D. students, and professorial colleagues from Wharton and other universities. Several have become close friends as well as colleagues. When I accepted this prestigious award, I did so on behalf of all the researchers who have been contributors to our joint work product. A Tribute to Gilbert A. Churchill, Jr.Gil Churchill has continued to show how smart he is by taking early retirement. He’s now free to savor friendships and avocations that are essential for a fruitful and balanced life. At the same time, a trip to the office now and then keeps him in touch with his professional associates and friends–an excellent balance, it seems to me. Among Gil’s many accomplishments, he has won the JMR’s coveted O’Dell Award in 1981, the AMA’s Distinguished Marketing Educator Award in 1986, the Academy of Marketing Science’s Outstanding Educator Award in 1993, and the Paul D. Converse Award in 1996. In addition, he has given unstintingly of his time as a faculty member in eleven of AMA’s annual Doctoral Consortia. As an educator, Gil has served on over 30 Ph.D. dissertation committees. His well-known textbook, Marketing Research: Methodological Foundations,is the “bible” in the field–now in its sixth edition, and still going strong. He has authored or co-authored seven other books in diverse areas of marketing. In addition to all of the above, Gil has managed to find time to serve as an AMA board member and Marketing Sciences Institute Council member. His service to his department and school is no less impressive. The thoroughness and care with which Gil does research is illustrated by the excellent article, “The Determinants of Salesperson Performance: A Meta Analysis,” co-authored with Neil Ford, Steven Hartley, and Orville Walker, Jr., which appeared as the lead article in JMR’s May 1985 issue. The authors conducted an extensive meta-analysis of 116 articles dealing with the determinants of salespeople’s performance. The authors investigated 1653 instances of associations between sales performance and such determinants as personal factors, skills, selling role, aptitude, motivation, and environmental variables. The authors also examined the possible influence of various moderator variables, such as product type and customer type, on sales performance. By any measure, this study was a tour de force and deserving of high praise by the research community. This article typifies the patience and comprehensiveness of Gil’s scholarship. His cumulative contributions in research methodology, reliability/validity of measurement scales, sales management, and innovation diffusion show both the breadth and depth of a highly talented and highly motivated researcher and scholar. He is richly deserving of the award that bears his name. Whither the Field of Marketing Research?Now that I’ve had time to ramble on about my past and extol Gil’s many virtues, it’s probably time to get down to the business of the future of marketing research methodology. Many of the tools that we now routinely use are basically products of the computer age, including:
Recently, Doug Carroll (at Rutgers University) and I prepared two editorials for the Journal of Marketing Research. Both articles deal with the use of psychometric tools--specifically conjoint analysis and multidimensional scaling--in marketing research and practice. The first editorial (on conjoint analysis) appeared in the November 1995 issue of JMR and the second (on MDS) is slated for Spring 1997 publication. Both editorials focus on the dramatic disparity between what is invented versus what is used. For example, in the November 1995 edm95 editorial on conjoint and experimentice analysis, we said: What appears to be lacking [in marketing research] is convincing evidence of whether (1) the newer conjoint methods for coping with larger numbers of attributes and levels are markedly superior to the older approaches and (2) individualized conjoint, experimental choice, and latent class conjoint models lead to different market share estimates and, if so, which is better under which conditions. Practical answers to these interrelated questions entail multicriterion validation and performance measures. Also, from a practical standpoint, there is need for a programmer or entrepreneur willing to undertake the time and expense necessary to develop, sell, and maintain user friendly computer packages in the industry marketplace. What makes some research techniques catch fire while others languish? While no definitive answer is possible, Doug and I went on to say that the models/techniques that have received industry attention tend to show the following characteristics:
The Marketing Science Institute’s research support, funds, workshops, seminars, and its wide dissemination of working papers is also an important force in the diffusion process. Many AMA local chapters conduct tutorials in research methodology as do a large number of universities. International journals, such as the Journal of the Market Research Society and the International Journal of Research in Marketing also speed up the diffusion process. Despite increased interest in quality teaching, our most prominent business schools still view research and publication as a major part of their mandate. New models and techniques will still flow. The trick is to provide early evaluations of their potential for business application, including balancing the costs versus gains of potential adoption. Last, but not least, we need the help of practitioners willing and able to provide the software development and entrepreneurial skills to put the new ideas into practice. Congratulations to the winners of the recent SIG election:Immediate Past Chair – Roland Rust Vice-Chair (Conference Sessions) – Wagner Kamakura Vice-Chair (PR) – Praveen Kopalle Newsletter Editor – Sylvia Keyes
Immediate Past Chair – Roland RustRoland T. Rust is the Madison S. Wigginton Professor of Management at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University, where he directs Vanderbilt's Center for Services Marketing. His 1995 article, “Return on Quality (ROQ): Making Service Quality Financially Accountable” (written with Anthony Zahorik and Timothy Keiningham) won the Journal of Marketing's Alpha Kappa Psi Award for the article that had the greatest impact on the practice of marketing. He has also won best article awards from the Journal of Advertising and the Journal of Retailing. His books include Service Marketing, Return On Quality, Advertising Media Models, Service Quality, and Readings in Service Marketing. His work on Return on Quality resulted in a 1994 cover story in Business Week. Professor Rust was the 1994 recipient of the Outstanding Contribution to Advertising Research award, a career achievement award presented by the American Academy of Advertising, and was the 1995 recipient of the Henry Latane Distinguished Doctoral Alumnus Award from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He currently serves as Chair of the AMA Marketing Research SIG and Chair of the American Statistical Association's Section on Statistics in Marketing. Professor Rust serves on the editorial review boards of seven journals, including Marketing Science and the Journal of Marketing Research. He holds a BA in Mathematics from DePauw University, and an MBA and PhD in Marketing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Madison
S. Wigginton Professor of Management Chair – George FrankeGeorge R. Franke is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Alabama. His research interests include research methods, public policy, and ethics. He has won best-paper awards from the Journal of Marketing Research, American Marketing Association, and Southern Marketing Association, and he was a finalist for the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing’s best-paper award for volumes 10-12. University
of Alabama Chair-Elect – Naveen DonthuNaveen Donthu is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Georgia State University. He has an M.S. in Management Science and Ph.D. in Marketing, both from the University of Texas at Austin. He was previously Assistant Professor of Marketing at Georgia Tech. His research in the areas of Marketing Research Methodology, Site Selection Models, Comparative and Outdoor Advertising, Brand Equity, and Hispanic Consumer Research have appeared in several leading Marketing and Advertising journals, such as Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Advertising, etc. After serving as the Vice Chair of the AMA Marketing Research SIG in 1996, he will be the Chair-Elect for the SIG in 1997. He may be contacted at: (404)
651 1043 - phone Vice-Chair (PR) – Praveen KopallePraveen K. Kopalle is an Assistant Professor at the Amos Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and was on the faculty of the University of Arizona prior to his appointment at Dartmouth. His research interests include pricing, product quality, and product bundling. His research has appeared in Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Letters, and Marketing Science. His teaching interests are marketing management, marketing models, marketing research, pricing, and marketing new products. 100
Tuck Hall, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College Dwayne BallDwayne Ball is currently an associate professor of marketing at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, Nebraska. Since the creation of the Market Research SIG he has served as the officer in charge of the Web site and as a member of the nominating committee. He received his Ph.D. from Ohio State in quantitative psychology, with a minor in consumer behavior research. He has published in the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Consumer Psychology, the Journal of Product and Brand Management, and many others. He was a consumer research manager for 4 years for the Procter & Gamble Company, and has taught for 10 years at Nebraska. His interests are in measurement and validity of multivariate statistical techniques. Doug BowmanDoug has a BASc (1985) in engineering from the University of Waterloo, an MBA (1987) from the University of Western Ontario, and a PhD (1993) from the University of Pennsylvania. His research has appeared in JMR and in Marketing Science. He is currently working on research projects that involve modeling buyer-seller relationships in business services markets, and projects that seek to explain the effects of marketing mix variables. On the teaching front, he was named the Outstanding Undergraduate Teacher at Krannert in each of the last two years, and was runner up for the outstanding graduate program instructor this past year. On the personal side, he enjoys helping his wife raise three boys all six and under, running, and coaching little league soccer teams to an occasional victory. Assistant
Professor of Management (Marketing) Newsletter Editor – Sylvia KeyesSylvia is a Professor at Bridgewater State College, where she has taught for the past fourteen years. With her students, she has become a pioneer in southeastern Massachusetts in experiential learning. Every semester she provides consulting project teams to at least eight organizations, some of which are industrial corporations and others are non-profit volunteer community agencies. In 1995 she won the Hugh G. Wales Faculty Advisor Award for her work as advisor to the Bridgewater Collegiate Chapter of AMA. Bridgewater
State College “Contemporary Marketing Research Methods and Issues” By George FrankeThe special session preceding the AMA Summer Educators’ Conference, on Saturday, August 31st, attracted a standing-room-only crowd. Organized by Naveen Donthu of Georgia State University, the session featured eight presentations by experts in their fields. The MR SIG thanks all the presenters and attendees for participating in this special session. These summaries are based on audiotapes graciously supplied by Giles D’Souza of the University of Alabama and Wes Starr of Open Space Consultants, plus the editor’s notes. Apologies to the presenters for any inadvertent misrepresentations of their remarks. Sunil Gupta (University of Michigan) discussed “Marketing Research on the Internet.”The promise of this field is boosting profits through greater customer knowledge; the peril is that the Internet increases possibilities for switching brands and suppliers. The Internet offers several advantages to marketers and marketing researchers:
An illustration of the Internet’s research value comes from a magazine that solicited reader input on proposed cover A versus cover B. In just six days, two iterations of evaluations were obtained at a cost of around $2,500–faster, cheaper, and more conveniently than typical alternative research methods. Don Lehmann (Columbia University) presented “Meta Analysis: Implications for Research Design.”Research helps answer two kinds of questions: How do we deal with the current problem, and What have we learned from the past? When enough answers to the first question have accumulated, a meta-analytic answer to the second question may make further such research unnecessary. This relationship suggests the following syllogism: The
purpose of academic research is to produce generalizations. As studies accumulate, observations pile up in particular cells of a research design (e.g., different advertising media in different countries). The most valuable incremental contributions to the research stream often come from breaking up the collinearity between previous studies. For example, if past studies have mostly examined U.S. TV ads and Japanese magazine ads, a new study of U.S. magazines or Japanese TV may be more valuable than an analysis of radio advertising in either country. Lehmann is working with John Farley on a paper showing how the eigenstructure of the natural experimental design formed by past studies may identify the most useful directions for new research. V. Kumar (University of Houston) talked about his experiences with “Issues in International Marketing Research.”Kumar recommended a standardization strategy that was explicitly international in scope, as opposed to trying to adapt procedures from one country or culture to another. The starting point for international marketing research is to understand the culture. For example, Japanese respondents generally use the scale midpoint if it is available, so 4- or 6-point scales work better than 5- or 7-point scales. Units of analysis in secondary data may be defined very differently across countries. In the U.S., for example, “urban” is cities of 20,000 or more; in some countries, there are no cities that large. Even as familiar a term as “billion” may cause confusion, because i t may refer to a thousand millions (9 zeroes, as in the U.S.) or a million millions (12 zeroes, as in the U.K.). Outside the U.S., snowball sampling works best for most products and countries. Standardizing data within countries is helpful for making cross-country comparisons. Kumar presents other suggestions in his marketing research text with Aaker and Day and in a book in preparation focusing strictly on international marketing research. Bill Perreault (University of North Carolina) discussed “Inferential Statistics versus Heuristics” in the context of trends in research methods over the past 30 years.Heuristics are statistical or mathematical procedures that base inferences on rules of thumb rather than statistical distributions. Both approaches were part of the “multivariate revolution” of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which involved packaged software for MANOVA, MDS, conjoint analysis, and many other procedures. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw greater attention paid to measurement issues and covariance structures, choice models, and models for nonnumeric data. Perreault noted that at the Ph.D. consortium prior to the conference, Paul Green had reviewed these trends and concluded that progress in marketing research hadn’t matched the promise; people introduced improved procedures but practitioners didn’t pay much attention. Perreault’s conclusion is a little more optimistic: If you take a logic-driven approach to solving a problem, a good solution may influence people for a long time to come. Today’s computing power opens new possibilities for understanding data. For example, regression/correlation procedures are the most common methods in the social sciences because sums of squared deviations lend themselves to comparisons with the F-distribution, not because squaring is intrinsically the optimum way to weight departures from the mean. Faster computers allow for permutation tests, resampling analyses, and the like, which may be more useful for a given purpose. Heuristics also make it easier to think about modeling individuals, not just the masses, and also facilitate analyses of large, sparse matrices compared to traditional methods. Perreault concluded with two recommendations. First, stay focused on the underlying problem, then work backwards to the appropriate solution (i.e., don’t see every problem as a “nail” just because you have a “hammer” in your methods toolkit). Second, as noted by Ralph Day on many occasions, if you’re going to try a new method, look at an old problem; if you’re looking at a new problem, use an established method. Brian Ratchford (SUNY-Buffalo) gave an overview of several methods for measuring “Marketing Efficiency” in a retail context.Index numbers summarize the ratios of outputs to inputs (e.g., sales per labor hour). Index numbers raise questions of weighting when considering multiple inputs and outputs, and they cause scaling problems in that ratios break down when there are economies or diseconomies of scale. Translog cost functions examine outputs as a function of input prices. Productivity changes shift a function over time. The many cross-product terms cause collinearity problems in estimating the Translog function. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) uses a linear programming model to compare productivity across outlets. DEA is more flexible than the Translog approach but is more sensitive to outliers. A challenging but important issue in measuring retail output and productivity is to assess the services provided in the process of making the sale, such as providing product assortments that save consumers time in making comparisons. Len Parsons (Georgia State University) went into more detail on the methods of “Data Envelopment Analysis.”His research focuses on internal benchmarking, using DEA to identify performance extremes (typically between salespeople or retail outlets) to quantify the difference between good and poor performers, and to help find explanations and determinants of performance differences. An “efficient” situation is one in which an output cannot be increased without either increasing inputs or decreasing other outputs. Most of the literature on DEA is from operations research/operations management, where the focus is generally on reducing inputs. Marketing applications have focused more on increasing outputs. Factors beyond a salesperson’s control, such as the amount of advertising in a region, can be accounted for in productivity comparisons. DEA analyses require comparable units—for example, Parsons found that he could not use it to compare salespeople calling on doctors with those calling on hospitals. Parsons has also found that outliers are not a big problem when working with companies to appraise the sales-force or retail outlets. Unlike researchers who are analyzing secondary data, managers typically know in advance who/what the outliers are, and why. Les Johnson (University of Sydney) dissected the problem of “Lisrel Overkill.”Lisrel and other programs for structural equations modeling are becoming more widely used by research firms. Their advantages include better measurement of constructs and tests of theory. A disadvantage is that they are supposedly causal, though in fact that may be rather “casual”—inferences are based on patterns of correlations, often between variables having method variance in common. Another disadvantage is that in practice, the search for good fit becomes an overriding concern. Researchers may expend great efforts to improve the fit, without really improving understanding of a phenomenon. Researchers, if they were to look, would also find that they often get qualitatively similar results by going through the process of scale construction and analyzing their models with ordinary regression. Simpler techniques may sometimes even improve understanding. Interactions and nonlinearities in latent variables are difficult to model properly, so Lisrel models are usually linear—even though the world is really nonlinear. Researchers may find EQS and AMOS to be simpler programs to use than Lisrel. According to Parsons, AMOS is almost too easy: anyone who can draw a picture can run a structural model, even without understanding the relevant concepts. Applications and misapplications of procedures for structural equation modeling are likely to grow as software developments reduce the start-up costs involved. Ed Rigdon (Georgia State University) went into “Data Mining: A Re-introduction.”Data mining is an old term with a new meaning and value: It will amount to an $800 million to $2 billion business by the turn of the century. The old-style analysis is not driven by formal hypotheses, and may be exploratory analysis in the guise of confirmatory analysis. This tends to happen with weak data and is not thought through in advance–it ignores Type I errors, third causes, validation needs, and the like. Today’s data mining is computer driven, using artificial intelligence to examine the data coming in at 100 to 1000 megabytes per day. It is part of a process called “knowledge discovery in data bases” (KDD), where knowledge is nontrivial extraction of previously unknown and potentially useful information from the data. A variety of approaches can by applied, including Tukey’s methods of exploratory data analysis, machine learning, knowledge-based and expert systems, neural networks, and genetic algorithms. At the same time that KDD makes data more valuable, it also makes prior knowledge even more valuable in that prior knowledge makes KDD more efficient. A potential downside to KDD is that respondents may worry about what marketers know and become less responsive to researchers’ inquiries. In fact, there is some movement in Europe to make such analysis illegal. Coming Events:The Marketing Research SIG is sponsoring a special session during the 1997 Winter AMA Marketing Educators' Conference, to be held in St. Petersburg, Florida in mid February. The session is titled “Reflections by former JM and JMR Editors.” Naveen Donthu of Georgia State University is organizing the session and he will also serve as chair. Gil Churchill, Bill Perreault, Mike Houston, Bart Weitz and Rajan Varadarajan will participate in this session. They will share their experiences as editors of JM/JMR, assess their impact on the field, and discuss what they might have done differently. This event is planned for the opening session of February 16th. Please check the conference program for the exact time and location. Contact Naveen Donthu at (404) 651-1043 or donthu@gsu.edu if you have suggestions or questions about this session. A business meeting and reception is also planned for the conference, tentatively scheduled from 5-6 on February 16th. Check the conference program to confirm the time and place. |