Marketing Concentration
Overview
Welcome to our PhD program’s Marketing Concentration. To get a feel for our faculty and their research, please visit our Featured Research Faculty page, where you will also be able to link to other research faculty and non-research faculty as well.
The marketing concentration embraces an approach to academic business research that increasingly centers relationships among academia, industry, and other constituencies (e.g., governments). Historically, marketing scholars have developed and tested theory, and often addressed managerially relevant issues. However, scholars are increasingly expected to include immediate managerial relevance in their research either as a primary focus or as part of a hybrid focus on both. Here, at the crossroads of theory and practice, lie especially rich studies that maximize value-added by combining rigor and relevance. And this, in turn, increases the chances of our students publishing in the field’s most prestigious journals, where their work is read by the field’s most prestigious scholars, and sometimes industry leaders. To produce such multi-faceted research, we cultivate relationships with external constituencies (businesses, museums, governments, etc.). These partners bring to the table cutting-edge applied knowledge (e.g., of business practices) as well as access to important data, such as an organization or industry’s existing (secondary) data, or data from field experiments we might conduct within our partners’ real-world settings.
Within academics, scholarly marketing is commonly broken down into three broad areas: managerial, behavioral, and modeling. These three areas overlap somewhat in topics, and overlap further as scholars bridge or combine them. And such combinations are encouraged as the field increasingly values more holistic research and multi-method approaches. That said, the backgrounds in theory, substantive knowledge, and methods required within these areas vary enough that most scholars remain ensconced primarily within one area. Not surprisingly, the areas’ journals and conferences remain partially distinct despite notable overlap.
Managerial
Marketing’s managerial research focuses on how and why managers and firms do what they do, and how they can optimize their results. Surveys and qualitative methods are common in this research, though experiments are increasingly common, as are empirical models. The premier journals in marketing’s managerial area are the Journal of Marketing and Journal of Marketing Research, and two of the more popular top-tier journals are the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and Journal of Retailing. The premier annual conference is the American Marketing Association Summer Educators’ Conference (August), though many other respected conferences also exist.
Behavioral
Marketing’s behavioral research (often referred to as “consumer behavior”) focuses on (1) understanding how consumers think, feel, and make decisions about products and services, (2) how consumers interact with their products post-purchase, and (3) how different marketing interventions impact consumers in one way or another. Lab and field experiments remain the most common methods, though the discipline increasingly values multi-method approaches that also incorporate qualitative methods (e.g., focus groups), empirical modeling (e.g., econometric models of large data bases of family grocery purchases over time), and even anthropological methods such as participant observation, where, for example, scholars might live among a sub-culture or group for some time to better understand them. The premier journals in marketing’s behavioral area are the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Marketing Research, and two of the more popular top-tier journals are the Journal of Consumer Psychology and Journal of Advertising. The premier annual conference is the Association for Consumer Research Conference (October), though many other respected conferences also exist.
Modeling
Marketing’s modeling research focuses on the methodology of building and testing models, where the models usually require advanced statistical training and address practical business issues using real-world marketplace data. The most common type of modeling is that of empirical modeling, such as econometric models of large data bases of family grocery purchases over time. A smaller yet active area is that of analytical modeling, which consists of data-less mathematical models based on carefully constructed sets of premises, the derivations from which produce conclusions about how a particular market situation could, should, or will unfold. The premier journals in marketing’s modeling area are Marketing Science and the Journal of Marketing Research, and two of the more popular top-tier journals are Quantitative Marketing and Economics and the International Journal of Research in Marketing. The premier annual conference is the INFORMS Marketing Science Conference (June), though many other respected conferences also exist.