|
 There are some advantages in being an
academic who also works in industry, provided you are one of those
who see their role as taking knowledge forward rather than
travelling the world peddling theoretical ideas which are
unimplementable or bring no value to companies. As Professor of
Relationship Marketing at Bristol Business School, I have three
roles. One is to help students come to grips with ideas that are
intellectually sound and based in reality. One is to undertake
evidence-based research in my area - customer relationship
management.
The third is to work as part of a wider team
in the Business School to develop a worldwide reputation in
researching and understanding customer management. The advantage
of being a hybrid academic and practitioner is that you can stand
back from your academic work and look at it from the perspective
of the practitioner.
If you look at what is written about
marketing, what students are being encouraged to learn, and what
research is encouraged, the material divides into several broad
groups. They include:
- Uncritical
case studies, unfortunately sometimes designed to glorify
companies or lend themselves to simplistic analyses (Company X
did Y, and got result Z, with no serious analysis of why this
happened, whether it really happened at all and whether any
gain was durable).
- Extensive
classifications -seven ways to segment a market, six levels to
define a product-useful because they get students to think
about the variety of the marketing world, but potentially
deadening in that they discourage thinking about why we have
classification systems, whether they are the best, and so on.
- Theoretical
concepts - from those that are so trite they should never have
been documented, to stunning insights which revolutionise not
only the way marketers think, but also what customers get.
- Analyses,
based on qualitative or quantitative research, of what is
going on in a particular situation, whether it supports
particular marketing theories and why- these range from really
significant pieces of research to quite trite ones of limited
validity. This literature is particularly strong in the
classic areas of marketing, such as market research, database
marketing, brand management, but weaker in newer areas, such
as CRM and e-business.
- Works
at the meta-level - on areas such as the sociology,
psychology, philosophy and practice of marketers, focusing for
example on whether what marketers do is any use to anybody,
and why.
- My
favourite - works that look very hard at what marketers do,
why they do it, what works and what does not, and why. I quote
two examples below. Whichever
approach we decide to take, use, we are fortunate to have an
extensive literature to draw on.
We may not agree with all the contents, but we
certainly have plenty of material for students to discuss. In
the new areas that we are focusing on at Bristol, customer
relationship management and e-business, we are less fortunate.
What is more, we are aware that it is in new marketing areas
that marketers can be at their worst, in terms of a
disciplined approach to management. The evidence of this comes
from these sources:
- Two
research-based books showing how rarely marketers examine and
understand information that shows what works - Bob Shaw's
book, Improving-Marketing Effectiveness (The Economist Books
1998) and John McKean's book, The Information Masters (Wiley
1999).
Our dream is that we will not teach our
students to be obsessed by data, systems or even customers. Too
much of the current literature and publicity around CRM does this.
On the contrary, we shall be helping them to understand that in
these new areas, just like in the older areas of marketing
achievement, what works does so because of companies' good (but
never perfect) processes for analysing, planning, implementing and
measuring what they do with customers. This may not sound very
exciting. Our problem is that marketing directors - and sometimes
the media - fail to understand that managing marketing is not the
same as knowing about marketing content, media, channels etc. The
two are very different. Of course, we shall be working with the
best tools.
Merlin
Stone is Professor of Relationship Marketing at
Bristol Business School. He is also a Senior Manager with
Mummert + Partner, a leading German firm of management
consultants, and a Director of QCi Ltd and Swallow Information
Systems Ltd.
|
