Editorial: making behavioral research more practically relevant

Citation

Biswas, D. (2014), "Editorial: making behavioral research more practically relevant", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 31 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/JCM-07-2014-1076

Editorial: making behavioral research more practically relevant

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Consumer Marketing, Volume 31, Issue 5

There have been growing concerns that academic research in consumer behavior is getting too technical and in the process becoming detached from any form of meaningful practical and managerial relevance. Consistent with this sentiment, in his 2012 ACR presidential address, Jeff Inman urged consumer behavior researchers to generate “useful insights” to make their research more relevant to public policy-makers, industry and consumers. Others have made similar urges as well, in the recent past (Pham, 2013). In this editorial, I highlight a few guidelines for making behavioral research more practically relevant with the hope that behavioral research can potentially make a difference in actual practices for businesses and other stakeholders. In that regard, JCM strives to be the journal outlet publishing such articles. I also highlight the types of papers JCM seeks to publish, going forward.

Practical relevance, conceptual rigor and academic impact

Sometimes concerns are raised that papers that focus too much on practical and managerial relevance might not be rigorous enough conceptually and may not make an academic impact in terms of academic readership, citation and impact. Such concerns arise from the fact that a paper that is too managerially relevant might not have a strong enough conceptual framework, or examine the underlying process with enough depth, or make a meaningful contribution to academic knowledge. It is not a totally unfounded concern that a paper focused on too much theoretical underlying process is unlikely to be appealing to practitioners. On the other hand, a paper just highlighting some interesting practically relevant effects without pinning down the theoretical process will just be a mere “cool effects” paper without the potential to make a conceptual impact. These are valid concerns. However, I argue in this editorial that these issues need not be mutually exclusive and there can be a “sweet spot” middle position where a paper can be conceptually rigorous, making a theoretical contribution, and at the same time influencing business practice. I use three papers as case examples to make my point in this regard.

Chandon and Wansink (2007a). This paper won the “best paper award” at the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR). Through a series of cleverly designed studies, the authors provide insights into why in spite of fast-food restaurants increasingly serving lower-calorie options, there has not been corresponding expected reduction in calorie intake or obesity rates. This paper not only received the best paper award from JCR, but also continues to receive a very high level of citations and has made significant contributions to conceptual insights and business practices. This paper also received widespread coverage in the popular press and hence the findings reached a wider audience.

Chandon and Wansink (2007b). This paper, published in the Journal of Marketing Research, won the prestigious O’Dell award. The paper’s key finding that calorie estimation biases are more strongly influenced by meal size than by body size, has strong conceptual and practical implications. Hence, not surprisingly, this paper has had meaningful influence on business practice and has at the same time made profound conceptual contribution and continues to have a high level of citation.

Goldstein et al. (2008). This paper, published in JCR, reported the findings of two field experiments. The studies demonstrated that employing descriptive norms (such as “the majority of guests reuse their towels”) was found to be more effective than the usual practice employed by hotels which focused on environmental protection. Unlike most other papers published in journals like JCR, this paper did not have detailed process studies examining the underlying mechanism of the findings. However, the paper is conceptually strong and made a significant impact to theory and practice, as evidenced by the extremely high number of citations and its influence on how hotels implement pro-environment policies. Moreover, the findings of this paper have strong implications for pro-environmental behavior, in general.

Common themes across impactful papers

There are several common themes across these three highlighted papers, and these common themes seem to run across almost all papers that make an impact to theory and practice. I outline three such common themes below:

• Innovative ideas that challenge current practices. These three papers, as well as similar impactful papers seem to challenge current managerial and consumer practices, which, in turn, make these papers interesting and thought provoking.

• Out-of-the-box thinking. These impactful papers have unique insights and look at research problems from a different perspective than that used by prior studies.

• “Non-cookie-cutter” approach. These papers usually involve innovative field studies and other novel study designs and data collection methods instead of using a cookie-cutter approach toward research.

Editorial vision for JCM and ideal papers to be published in JCM

One of my key goals for JCM, as Editor, is to build a strong reputation for JCM as a journal that strongly values both theoretical as well as managerial implications. Hence, an ideal paper published in JCM should focus strongly on conceptual and practical aspects and also potentially generate interest in the popular press and influence academic thoughts. Papers with novel field studies would be highly welcome in JCM as would papers that challenge existing paradigms in academia and business practices. While “cookie-cutter” studies have its benefits, it seems sometimes overused. As the Editor of JCM, I would prefer papers with interesting studies conducted in innovative ways. Also, all papers should have clear-cut, explicit and strong managerial implications.

At our end, we would also do whatever it takes to help authors publish high-quality papers with theoretical and practical implications. We aim to complete each round of review within two months and papers will get a conditional acceptance or rejection decision latest after two rounds of reviews. We also aim to disseminate the findings of papers published in JCM to a wider audience by having press release to a range of media outlets, for select articles.

In conclusion, we strive to have JCM as the journal, which publishes conceptually strong articles that can potentially influence business practices and also has interesting enough findings to have an appeal to the popular press and to a wider audience.

Dipayan Biswas

References

Chandon, P. and Wansink, B. (2007a), “The biasing health halos of fast food restaurant health claims: lower calorie estimates and higher side-dish consumption intentions”, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 34, October, pp. 301-314.

Chandon, P. and Wansink, B. (2007b), “Is obesity caused by calorie underestimation? A psychophysical model of fast-food meal size estimation”, Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. 44 No. 1, pp. 84-99.

Goldstein, N.J., Cialdini, R.B. and Griskevicius, V. (2008), “A room with a viewpoint: using social norms to motivate environmental conservation in hotels”, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 35, October, pp. 472-482.

Pham, M.T. (2013), “The seven sins of consumer psychology”, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Vol. 23, October, pp. 411-423.