Editorial

Citation

Crosier, K. (2006), "Editorial", Marketing Intelligence & Planning, Vol. 24 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/mip.2006.02024baa.001

Editorial

Our Viewpoint for this issue is contributed by a recently retired éminence grise of the UK's large academic marketing community. Emeritus Professor Michael Thomas relocated from headship of the Department of Marketing at the University of Lancaster, one of the very first homes of the discipline, to a professorial chair at the University of Strathclyde, where he joined the author of the Viewpoint in our last issue. You may suspect a closed shop, given that an honorary senior research fellow there myself, but there is an intellectual rationale. These two commissioned essays, from authors whose semi-retirement permits the luxury of thinking as well as doing, respectively, invite us to point our intellectual telescopes backwards and forwards over the marketing landscape.

Michael Baker invited us to rediscover the gurus of yesteryear, and recognise that their ideas never deserved to be consigned to “history”. In commenting editorially, I mentioned that my eyes had been opened more than two decades ago by a couple of quite slim paperbacks: Future Shock by Alvin Toffler and The Age of Discontinuity by Peter F. Drucker. Michael Thomas draws our attention to a sea-change in Drucker's view of the world in which we ply our trade, from the straightforward capitalist rhetoric of The Practice of Management (1954) through discussion of those disconcerting dislocations in the marketplace (1969) to disillusionment with the conventional capitalist ethic in Managing in the Next Century (2002). My attention needed to be drawn to something I had not noticed; perhaps yours does too?

If Drucker's concerns are well-founded, Michael Thomas argues, then those of us who practise marketing management, or advise others who do, or teach yet others who will, have a moral obligation to take our role as “citizen professionals” seriously, and to behave accordingly. We are collectively “social trustees for a just society.” We should be alert against the malpractice of mismanagement. And we must reject “epistemopathology” – for an explanation of which, read his stimulating Viewpoint.

In this issue, we introduce the Right to Reply to points of view expressed in viewpoints. This first such piece is by invitation, but I invite you to respond spontaneously if you have strong views of your own. Do not just sit there muttering; start a dialogue.

Emeritus Professor Malcolm McDonald is a guru of note from one of the UK's foremost business schools. As a respected consultant, especially in marketing planning, he is well placed to comment on the notions of social trusteeship and civic professionalism. His view is that “successful marketers and marketing institutions have already absorbed the message, embraced the notion, and taken the steps.” Furthermore, “No matter what `marketing' is performed, the consumer is still sovereign as long as he or she is free to make choices ... even mighty multinationals get their just deserts when they ignore the power of the consumer.” Therefore, we should be able to accept that life is imperfect. “Management” is not necessarily good, or even honest, and can certainly sometimes be mismanagement, but it is not sovereign; citizen-consumers are.

Next, we welcome a team of six authors from Brazil. Antonio Juarez Alencar and Eduardo Martins Ribeiro research in at the Institute of Mathematics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Armando Leite Ferreira is at the School of Business there, and Priscilla M.V. Lima and Fernando Silva Pereira Manso both work in its Electronic Computer Centre. In commendably clear English (native speakers, take note!), they propose a variant of the recency-frequency-value model of market segmentation in direct marketing, incorporating a “genetically optimised” algorithm. Experimental testing suggests that it improves results, permits more systematic application of consumption data, is not conceptually demanding to build, can be flexible in use, and therefore holds real promise of much improved cost-effectiveness for direct marketing campaigns. The last quarter of the paper, particularly the question-and-answer section is undoubtedly proselytising, but, as the authors say, their model does have clear implications for the gathering of marketing intelligence and the implementation of marketing plans, in practice.

Carloyn Strong and Sidira Eftychia, of the Cardiff Business School, report the latter's research study of tobacco consumption among teenagers in Greece. Smoking is a major concern in social marketing, of course, and Greeks are by a wide margin the heaviest smokers in Europe. The study found that the much-researched effects of tobacco marketing and advertising were less influential than the pressure to fit in with the behaviour patterns of friends and the social lead given by the family, not only by smoking themselves but also – most interestingly – by offering teenagers their first cigarette. Since the study was intended to be only exploratory, the report of the results is narrative rather than tabular; its value lies in the highly specific context and the clear implications for further research.

Mohammed Al-Hawari is a PhD candidate in the School of Commerce at Central Queensland University in Australia. With Tony Ward of the School of Marketing & Tourism there, he proposes a model linking the financial performance of providers of automated banking services with service quality, as mediated by customer satisfaction. In the process, he provides a strikingly extensive list of references cited in the literature review. A classic example of the “scholarly” research paper, in which Marketing Intelligence & Planning does not specialise, this one is commendably clearly expressed and well organised. There is much to be learnt from it about customers' relationships with their banks when contact is not face-to-face, in the Australian context and probably more widely.

Christine Ennew and Anita Fernandez-Young write from the Nottingham University Business School, presenting a case study of teaching and learning online, drawing on the literature and their own involvement in the United Kingdom e-University. They conclude that the reason for the failure of that initiative is explained by a technology-driven and supply-driven delivery strategy, and suggest a number of practical implications for present and future applications. Given that distance learning, online programmes, virtual learning environments and other “weapons of mass instruction” are popular in postgraduate marketing education today, not least on grounds of presumed cost-effectiveness, this case history makes absorbing reading.

Lastly, Marketing Consultant Peter Martin and David Chapman, formerly of Sheffield Hallam University and now an Associate at the University of Lincoln, discuss the demonstrable reluctance of British small and medium-size enterprises to recruit marketing graduates. Martin's doctoral research found two powerful obstacles: the predictable mismatch between attributes demanded by SME owner-managers and those offered by marketing graduates, to be sure, but also the FMCG bias typically inculcated in the students by the teaching staff. It would have been helpful to have told more about the questions put in the evidently broad-ranging research instrument(s), but the findings offer valuable insights from the real world. The authors offer sound practical advice for the redesign of curricula and syllabuses accordingly, and for changing perspectives on both sides of the supply-demand gap. What particularly resonated for me, as an external examiner at several UK universities over the years, was their call for more visiting lectures, field visits and other means of showing marketing students how to develop and differentiate their product offering – not just in the specific case of SMEs, but across the whole range of destinations.

After manuscripts had gone into production, the authors pointed out to me the accidental implication that SMEs in the UK axiomatically aim for growth. The research sample had in fact deliberately excluded sole traders, simple partnerships and employers of fewer than five staff, on a precedent in the literature. Such “lifestyle” or “mom and pop” businesses often do not seek growth at all, and rarely employ marketing graduates.

The last two papers in this issue focus on aspects of a broad issue: the transmission of theories, paradigms, principles and recipes for best practice to future planners and strategists via the channel of university education. That is the subject of a guest-edited Special Issue coming next: Marketing Education: Constructing the Future. Given our editorial objectives, which you will find on the inside back cover, I confidently expect that everyone will discover something of immediate interest.

Keith Crosier