{"id":613,"date":"2020-12-01T13:42:27","date_gmt":"2020-12-01T11:42:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/?p=613"},"modified":"2020-12-01T13:42:27","modified_gmt":"2020-12-01T11:42:27","slug":"do-you-care-if-your-research-is-managerially-relevant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.hanken.fi\/cers\/2020\/12\/01\/do-you-care-if-your-research-is-managerially-relevant\/","title":{"rendered":"Do you care if your research is managerially relevant?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

You often hear people\ncriticize scientific articles saying that they rarely address genuinely\nmanagerially relevant and topical issues let alone offer recommendations for\nhow to deal with these. While offering value to practitioners indeed for many scientific\njournals is of secondary priority, it is nothing but a shame that journals cannot\nmore often than now be of more significance to practitioners, entrepreneurs,\nand different societal stakeholders. So next, inspired by a recently published empirical\nstudy about how managers use marketing research, I set out to briefly reflect\non the issue of managerial relevance of marketing research articles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Why is research not managerially relevant?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What many consider to\nbe the root causes for the theory-practice gap are broadly speaking related to\nhow research is conducted<\/em> and to how research is communicated<\/em>.  What the former issue relates to and is the\nresult of is \u201cfailure to generate relevant research ideas and insights\naltogether, fueled by an ever-growing focus on methodological sophistication, a\ntendency to examine niche phenomena, and production of incremental instead of\ninnovative insights.\u201d (Wiegand et al., 2020, p. 3)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The communication\nproblem, on the other hand, refers to \u201cfailure to present research in a\npractitioner-accessible form, leaving managers unaware of the existence of\nrelevant work and its implications for everyday business.\u201d (Wiegand et al.,\n2020, p. 3) No wonder research as a result will be out of sync with practice or\nnever even have a chance of being relevant and of use. Even if more experts,\ntrainers, and business magazines would pick up research ideas and findings and\nspread them to practitioners, it is not enough, researchers themselves should\nalso more often than now deliberately and directly reach out to practitioners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What research is managerially relevant?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Research is essentially\nmanagerially relevant when it reaches practicing managers with nonobvious\nuseful insights. Such insights can be useful for practitioners in different\nways. Some conventional ways are that the insights are used for descriptive\npurposes meaning that they shed light on what and how questions, are used to\nexplain why or to predict changes and developments, or to formulate effective\nintervention. (Van de Ven and Johnson, 2006) Managers can also employ research\nfindings in other ways such as to justify decisions and improve argumentation.\n(Wiegand et al., 2020) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Earlier this year, four\nEuropean marketing researchers Wiegand, Becker, Imschloss, and Reinartz (2020)\npublished results from an empirical study about how managers use marketing\nresearch. They outlined research as managerially relevant when it addresses a\nbusiness, organizational, or managerial issue or opportunity that concerns a\nsufficiently large or important group of organizations in the researched field,\nproviding potentially useful insights or inspiration to better understand,\nframe, or solve this issue in the organizational context. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can marketing research be useful to inspire managers?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wiegand, Becker, Imschloss, and Reinartz (2020) in addition to problem-solving and educational purposes verified another way in which managers can use academic research, namely for inspiration. This means that managers used academic work to gain new ideas and perspectives, understand future trends, or broaden their horizon. They found examples of such research in the ethnographic online studies of Robert Kozinets or the work of Ozcan and Rangaswamy (2018) that discusses current and future developments in platform business models. In their sample, a study examining the effect of brand equity on employee salaries was classified as inspirational because it provided a radically new perspective on brand management\u2014one managers had not contemplated about before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In their interviews with practitioners, Wiegand et al. (2020) found some but very few articles in marketing to be inspirational. Inspirational research, they found, relied on compelling arguments which were based on or illustrated by real-world examples and complete reasoning that accounted for real-world conditions, actual practices, and plausible scopes of managerial action. Such research oftentimes originated from transferring ideas from seemingly unrelated research fields or observations to the marketing domain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be useful, the\ninspirational research had to have the potential to create substantial\ncompetitive advantage and be clearly connected to managerial realities. As inspiration\nresearch can be highly risky for companies to implement, they found that it was\nimportant that researchers decrease perceived risk by making potential gains\nexplicit and concretely and realistically inform decision making or add to\nexisting practices. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What can marketing researchers do to become more managerially relevant?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Based on their\nanalysis of the extensive data, Wiegand et al. (2020) offer a list of\nrecommendations for how researchers, managers, and editors can narrow the\ntheory-practice gap. I recap some of their suggestions to researchers here but\nrecommend that everyone interested reads their freely online available\npublication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They advise researchers to first identify a \u201cdisruptive\u201d research idea by for example attentively observing the environment and people\u2019s behaviour, being creative – connecting unrelated ideas, using sources from unrelated fields (press, news, academic literature) as inspiration. They further recommend researchers to not be too radical to increase credibility, avoid claiming that the research questions existing practices, and to discuss initial results early on with managers and to make sure the research is not too far-fetched to be credible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other suggestions they\noffer are that marketing researchers should select to topics that (1) address complex\nissues which are difficult for managers to address by themselves, (2) pertain\nto current developments, (3) cover issues likely to become important in the\nfuture, (4) address persistent \u201cnagging\u201d issues, or bring forward (5) novel\nideas or (6) nonobvious findings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That articles\ntoo seldom are managerially relevant and reach practitioners is unfortunate\u2014and\nembarrassing. Still, it should be fully possible for researchers, managers and\neditors to change this, and to become better at doing and communicating\nresearch that involves conceiving new concepts or theory, is exploratory,\nintroduces new methods and is forward-looking in nature. To be relevant, each\none of us as marketing researchers should ensure that we address meaningful\nbusiness, societal, and global problems. To have an impact we also need to work\nwith and for relevant partners and communicate broadly beyond our scientific\ncommunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marketing similarly to\nmany other management research disciplines is, as a \u201ctheory\u201d, after all, rather\napplied and practice dominant. One would think therefore that it is natural\nthat research in marketing is of true value and benefit for companies and the\nsociety. Fortunately, in the future, however, I think that we will see a change\nsince more and more editorials and articles highlight the need for marketing\nresearch to become more managerially relevant and discuss ways to accomplish\nthis. The trend is also amplified as research simply needs to become more\nclosely linked than now to significant topical business and societal challenges\nand provide useful insights for different stakeholders. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maria Holmlund<\/a>
Professor in Marketing<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This text is based on Wiegand\net al.\u2019s (2020) publication that I offer as reading recommendation if you want\nto read more on how researchers, managers, schools, and editors can bridge the\ntheory-practice gap: <\/p>\n\n\n\n