Editorial

Citation

Crosier, K. (2007), "Editorial", Marketing Intelligence & Planning, Vol. 25 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/mip.2007.02025eaa.001

Editorial

This issue is a good example of what I like to think of as our unique “brand”. It offers you a thinking-aloud piece, a “Right to Reply” to think about yourself. There are five articles that are lighter on “research” than on originality and the application of marketing principles in areas beyond the mainstream FMCG and services markets of the West. The 15 authors hail from seven countries. And only one article (apart from the right-to-reply piece) is based on formal mathematical analysis of quantitative data.

For the shadowy “authorities” who compile the journal ranking tables, that would seem like a statement of weakness. To many of our readers, it does not. I know that because they tell me so. If you agree, I think you will enjoy this selection. If you do not, then do please write to me, and tell me how you think we might strike a better balance in future between scholarliness and pragmatism.

Adam Lindgreen is a member of our Editorial Board. A Dane by birth, he was at the Technical University Eindhoven in the Netherlands for many years before taking up a chair at the Hull Business School in England in May 2007. He asked permission to exercise the right of reply we offer to any reader, in this case to take up some methodological points with the authors of an article on lifestyle segmentation in the issue number four of this volume. He is at pains to make it clear that the interesting and original application of actuarial arithmetic presented by the three researchers from Edinburgh University was entirely welcome, but that he and a compatriot who works as a research statistician in Copenhagen, Peder Frederiksen, are not quite convinced by the way in which the authors dealt with the timescale element in applying a particular regression analysis model to a database containing almost 11,000 buyers of insurance products. They suggest that some aspects of the practical application may need to be reconsidered. I leave it to you to decide who is right.

Heath McDonald of the Deakin Business School and Frank Alpert of the University of Queensland Business School, both in Australia pose a provocative question in their title: do those consumers we call “innovators” really matter as much as the textbooks seem to think they do? A comprehensive review of the literature makes an important distinction between true innovators and those who are merely early adopters, and are quite possibly simply following the lead of the innovators. To put it another way, they are first-wave followers, as distinct from the third-wave followers who earn the generic description in the Rogers scheme of things.

Their question is a good one that demands a thought-out answer. Are the benefits that may accrue from locating true innovators an targeting them with tailored initiatives worth the effort and cost it is bound to entail? Is innovation perhaps a consumer satisfaction in itself? Does a type of individual simply enjoy being an innovator or, at least, being thought of as one? I recall a couple of orchestral musicians, hardly the best paid of professions, who had a truly innovative house designed and built for them on a shoestring budget, but then splashed out on Philippe Starck appliances, and had to put the house on the market (twice) as their finances ran out. They started as innovators but ended as followers of fashion. What segmentation scheme would have detected them?

Kevin Hammond, Harry Harmon and Robert Webster re-manipulate data from a study first presented and discussed in Marketing Intelligence & Planning almost three years ago (volume 22, number 7), to show how more than 200 US business schools have put into practice a set of strategic marketing initiatives prescribed by a national quality programme, how implementation in a given case is related to the organisational characteristics of the school in question, and to the achievement of the excellence that is the goal of the programme in question.

Their findings will be inherently interesting to the large academic segment of our readership, for we are like the “senior leaders” in their study, knowing in our heart of hearts that universities have to market themselves to survive – especially in the UK, where there was a long history of state funding, and private fund-raising remains both underdeveloped and somewhat suspect. But, who actually does the marketing? In my own experience, the answer is senior administrators and promoted academics, neither of which categories would be automatic candidates for marketing management in the commercial world. Hammond and his colleagues conclude that attainment of excellence, in this context as in general, derives from the existence of a formal mission statement, formal marketing planning, and the planned motivation of the workforce: that is, us.

What the more inept practitioners of business-school marketing need is the people that McDonald and Alpert's study identified as “true administrators”. The irony here is that business schools teach their students the very discipline in which they so often perform poorly. They should plan to retain their own graduates, not just as future researchers and teachers but also as expert contributors to organisational marketing and promotion: train them and keep them. We let one of our own escape to an Australian University in that role; he told me he would have stayed at home if we had asked first. As it is, we're unlikely to lure him back from the Sunshine Coast of Queensland now.

Lisa Emslie and Richard Bent are also concerned with the application of marketing principles and practice by non-specialists in non-commercial organisations. Interpreting the transcripts of depth interviews with providers of professional services and advice to local businesses in Scotland, they look in particular at the efforts to target the many small businesses owned and operated by members of ethnic minorities. They find the same general lack of marketing expertise, even antipathy to the very idea, that characterises strategic management in business schools, and a particular failure, so far, to connect with the “small ethnic-owned businesses” that were the focus of their study for the Scottish Centre for Enterprise and Business Research. Those are a familiar feature of everyday commercial and social life in most Western countries, they make significant contributions to the local and national economies of many countries, and we need to know more about them. Though the study focuses on the providers of the services, we gain in the process of reading the discussion many interesting insights into the modus operandi of the intended beneficiaries: the family-based, hard-working, entrepreneurial retailers and service providers around the corner from you, somewhere.

An underlying theme in this issue is picked up by Norman Peng and his doctoral supervisor, Chris Hackley of the Royal Holloway division of the University of London. Here is another example of the transfer of marketing principles and practice to unfamiliar contexts, where they may be greeted with reactions ranging from indifference through puzzlement to downright hostility. Extending the marketing concept in this way is hardly a new thing today. Long memories will recall the proselytising by Kotler and Levy in the late 1960s. What is interesting is how many potential beneficiaries of a spot of marketing seem to agree with the famous riposte in the Journal of Marketing by David Luck: “Extending the concept of marketing: too far”.

The extension in this case is into political campaigning, a fascinating case in point. A very readable study reports depth interviews with several top-level movers-and-shakers in political marketing, in the UK and in Taiwan, where the lead author happens to originate, thinking aloud about the effect of transferred marketing technologies on campaign successes and failures. Anyone in the UK who reads this issue when it appears in print will be irresistibly reminded of the long wait for the Prime Minister to step down officially, and for the heir apparent to be crowned (or not: the saga continues as I write this). Those in Scotland will reflect on the role of political marketing in the parliamentary elections there, in which a highly confusing new voting system resulted in more than 1,000 spoiled ballots and a majority of just one parliamentary seat for the victors. Who would be a Procter & Gamble Marketing Manager, if political spin doctoring beckoned?

One theme is replaced by another: China. Ying Fan, of Brunel University in the UK hails from the People's Republic. Much has already been written about his topic, the phenomenon of gU¯anxi, but I make no apology for accepting his contribution to the debate. It has a history of having been in limbo elsewhere before it reached us, but that need not concern us, since the analysis is far from time-dependent. The article begins with a definitive explanation of gU¯anxi, plus descriptions of related concepts in other research traditions, which casts much more light on this crucial aspect of doing business in China than the customary statements that it is all about networking, except in a Chinese way. Fan's approach is furthermore unique, so far, in relating the phenomenon to the management of corporate reputation, specifically by multinational entrants to the market. Case examples of familiar mega-brands illustrate the underlying principles, applied successfully and unsuccessfully.

Headlong westernisation of the Chinese marketplace following the economic reforms that got under way in the 1980s is a common refrain in the literature, but we learn here that what is equally important is the very slow pace of political reform. The government, which still means the Communist Party, is perhaps the one key actor in the game that decides whether or not a good reputation can even be established in the first place, let alone nurtured and maintained thereafter. The Party's seal of approval, often quite literally, is taken by Chinese consumers as a kind of “authority endorsement” analogous with celebrity endorsement in the West. That cultural response is very different indeed from, for instance, the lukewarm reaction to the “crystal marks” “charter marks” and such like that ordinary consumers in the UK barely notice. Careful exploitation of gU¯anxi is the solution, but understanding of the nuances is the prerequisite. Fan's authoritative review provides the key.

Finally, Mario Duarte Canever, Assistant Professor at a State University in Brazil, reports a study carried out in collaboration with two co-authors who are based at a University Research Centre in The Netherlands, Hans van Trijp and Ivo van der Lans. This is the one technical, quantitative paper that I mentioned at the outset.

The research objective was to assess the effectiveness of conventional segmentation schemes as the basis of supply-chain strategy, an aim not irrelevant to the marketing challenges faced by the business schools in the studies by Hammond and his colleagues or Emslie and Bent. In this case, the proving ground was rather different: the expectations of Brazilian beef-eaters regarding the benefits to be gained from buying at particular outlets and for particular meals, and the product features claimed by the suppliers. Two-stage cluster analysis of data collected during more than 500 in-home interviews led to the conclusion that segmenting the market on the basis of both benefits and features, was likely to yield better strategies than either of the two bases alone. A model was constructed to permit planners to do this in a sequential process. The total of 19 managers also interviewed liked the idea in principle and recognised the risk of putting all their eggs in baskets labelled “benefits” or “features” (to mix the comestible metaphors), but seemed to doubt their own ability to implement the scheme in practice. The authors remark that this reflected their routine approach to marketing: keep it simple.

Something familiar there?

Keith Crosier