Tagged: Research News

I’m neither left nor right – I just want to know.

As far as academic disciplines go, marketing seems to have a rather stark divide between academics who totally believe that everything serious must be quantifiable – and those that believe it’s best to stick to qualitative data. At least that seems to be my impression after a few years “in the business” – and having just again had the pleasure of having a colleague try to pin me down as a “left brainer (quant)” or a “right brainer (qual)”… Being middle of the road – and “just curious” wasn’t a good enough answer it appeared. Of course, the latter part of the discussion inevitably turned to the well trodden (aka frequently used argument): “Well, if you even try to get anything qualitative published, don’t waste your time”. Luckily I remembered that at least for the Journal of Advertising (which in my field is at least the most “reputable” journal) the numbers simply don’t stack up – thanks to a presentation at the ICORIA conference. I don’t quite remember the numbers (left fail?), but I seem to remember that when considering submissions to the journal, the acceptance rate was actually slightly higher for qual then quant studies – the problem was basically that there were relatively few qual studies being submitted. Of course, this might be different depending on the journal, but I guess it’s a good start.
I have to admit, that I’m also a bit suspicious of the “are you a x or y” type categorisation. This really has two reasons:
Firstly, and we do seem to teach this to students somewhere in research methods 1, neither qual nor quants has all the answers. Rather, the powerful answers emerge when, where applicable, you bring them together.
Secondly, I think at least a few academics have an entrenched opinion not so much because one method is in someway  more superior to the other, but rather they have learned one way… and now simply do the same thing to all and everything. I can see the absolute attraction of this: I recently did my first serious meta-analysis. When looking for examples, I noticed a colleague who seems to have established almost the entire career doing pretty little else. Now, I’m not saying metas are an easy thing to do, but let’s face it, once you have all the scripts, formulas and conversions in place, it is reasonably easy to throw the method at just about anything that comes along. Good choice? Probably not in all cases.
So, where does that leave us? Well, I can see the attraction of simply replicating the methodology over and over again – and making a career out of it (and possibly becoming an expert in the method). But I wonder what happened to the good old virtue of being an academic for the pursuit of knowledge? REF and pressure to publish aside, should we not first and formost be seeking appropriate answers to questions we are interested in (and maybe a few others, too)? And if we are called Lecturer/Senior Lecturer/Prof in Marketing, is it really a good idea to be interested more in a method than in knowing more about (different or aspects of) Marketing? It seems to me if one becomes an expert in one method, a more suitable title might be X/Y/Z of that method… or is that view just simply too old fashioned?

Are Academics Really Artists?

painter-at-workI find it sometimes really difficult to describe what academics, especially at reasonably research focused universities, do. It seems easy to say that we teach, research and (increasingly) administer, but I wonder is that really a good definition of what we are about? Most people seem to think our main focus is on teaching, with the other activities just a small thing on the side. Conversely for many of us, creation of “new knowledge” – and passing this knowledge on, in various forms, including (but not limited to) through teaching, is something that we would at least like to dedicate most of our time to.

I recently had dinner with an artist friend of mine, and during the conversation he suggested just how many misconceptions there are of what an artist does (e.g. an artists “only” paints beautiful paintings). The more we talked about both our views and actual behaviour at work, the more it struck me how similar academics are to artists.

Take for example writing papers. In a way it is similar to creating works of art, such as, say paintings. There is a technique, there is some research and even skill that gets better with practice.
Think of what motivates good academics – and good artists: It’s not just the creation of artefacts such as paintings, sculptures or indeed papers, but rather expressing something: Passing on a message. Often involving multiple media: For example canvas and oil, maybe creating installation, music and movement in contemporary dance – or indeed papers, books, lectures and presentations. Both artists and academics persuade, try to make people think – and hope that the observers (or students) will start to dig deeper than just the surface, start to question what is the obvious.
Even when we sending in our papers for review to a journal has a cunning resemblance to trying to submit an idea for an exhibition, hoping that the gallery owner will find the work attractive enough to be exhibited.

I tried to search a bit around regarding definitions of academics, yet couldn’t find any that linked “us” to artists (apart from artists in residence, or practicing art academics). Maybe it isn’t the most obvious of all comparisons, but as I start the new academic year I find it quite a nice way to think of myself as an artist, someone “on a mission” to pass on a message, even just to make people stop and think about a few points I can raise.

Visual Branding is not effective (suggests the Tobacco Industry)

AdvertisingJTI, the company behind cigarette brands such as Camel, Benson & Hedges and Silk Cut has taken out full page adverts in the British press to inform readers that the potential move to enforce plain packaging for cigarettes is not backed by evidence - suggesting that plain packs will only increase illicit trade.

Could they be right? Well, apart from the obvious circumstantial question to ask (i.e. “Why do these companies spend millions on building their brand if really the visual representation on the pack is not important? Are they suggesting they are wasting money?”), what evidence is there that the claims by the JTI are true?

Firstly let‘s look at the idea that plain packs are easier to fake, and therefore could result in more illicit trade. While, on the surface, this argument may seem true, it does assume that the packs do not contain any other security elements. For example, a tax seal which may include (and does include in some countries) holograms etc to ensure it is the “real thing” (aka the tax has been paid). Of course, a plain pack itself is a little easier to fake than printing a more colourful one, but, given that there are no real banknote type security elements on the “main” packages now, I seriously doubt that even with full on branding these packs are exceedingly difficult to fake.

Secondly, and probably more importantly, JTI makes the implicit assumption that visual brand representation is irrelevant – at least when it comes to purchasing the product (i.e. changing the “on pack” visual identity has no effect). Proving or disproving this is, of course, a bit more tricky. JTI’s argument seems to suggest that consumers do not care how the brand looks – as long as the product is good. This seems inherently logical (especially for those people that think advertising and branding never ever influences them even one bit), but as Walsh, Mitterich and Mittal (2010, 2011) showed in two studies, consumers are remarkably “attached” to the logos of the brands they consume. Even relatively small changes to the visual identity of a brand can create negative brand assumptions. Of course, importantly, it is not just grown-ups who “attach” to the visual brand identity. Children, even before they can read or write, learn to recognise brands by their logo (Kinsky & Bichard, 2011). Of course, there are plenty more studies who confirm the importance of logos and visual identity. In other words, the evidence suggest that visual identity is essential – and there is categorically no evidence available to support the implicit claim by JTI that “removing branding” would have no or only a very small effect.

So what is the evidence in terms of cigarettes? Well, there is plenty of evidence available, much more than “would fit on a back of a cigarette pack“, as the advert claims …unless you put it on minuscule microfiches! Take, for example, this study by Wakefield, Germain and Durkin (2008). It shows “cigarette packs that displayed progressively fewer branding design elements were perceived increasingly unfavourably in terms of smokers‘ appraisals of the packs, the smokers who might smoke such packs, and the inferred experience of smoking a cigarette from these packs.” It concludes “Plain packaging policies that remove most brand design elements are likely to be most successful in removing cigarette brand image associations.” – which would be quite the opposite of what JTI seems to suggest. Moreover, this effect is especially strong for “young smokers” – as this study by Moodie, Mackintosh, Hastings and Ford (2011) shows. All of these studies have added to the evidence base that was presented in 2008 – although the advert claims there is no new evidence. Of course, the evidence can not be based on actual sales figures in “the real word“, as plain packaging is not yet reality. Thus, it relies on experiments and consumer surveys – something that actually most marketing research, including research by commercial companies, relies on. In fact, prelaunch research can never be anything else but surveys, focus groups and experiments – as the product simply does not exist in the general market. Does that mean the evidence from such studies is always right? Well, no. But let‘s face it, those methods are the gold standard to estimate what will happen if something “goes live“.

So what can we say about the advert: I think it is a tremendous shame that JTI has made this advert. It claims that there is little evidence to suggest that plain packaging will negatively impact brand attitudes and by extension behavioural intentions, when there is plenty of high quality evidence. More over, while the advert claims this “non existing“ evidence is a reason not the introduce plain packing, the advert actually fails to present any evidence that plain packaging would not work. Of course, plain packing is not going to make every smoker stop smoking overnight. But the evidence seems to suggest that it certainly would have some (negative) effect on brand attitude and intention to smoke.

What makes a great (marketing) scholar?

dutchThe current issue of the European Journal of Marketing includes a very interesting paper trying to identify the most influential authors and institutions in the marketing field. The authors, two of which are associated to accounting, and the third author works for a health care company, use what they call a “threshold citation analysis” looking at who gets cited the most in top marketing journals – i.e. who has the greatest impact on the academic debate in marketing.

What makes the paper interesting are some of the findings in terms of what it takes to “join the elite” – and of course who they are. For example, household names (for marketing students) like Philip Kotler appear fairly low in the list of most influential scholars (85), while Richard Oliver (1), Valarie Zeithaml (2), and James Anderson (3) may be less familiar to many.

A very interesting (and sobering – if you are outside the US) read is also the list of top universities: Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan are the three top ones when it comes to marketing citations. Europe has a VERY long way to go: The Swedish University of Uppsala is the highest ranked non-US institution (46) – and a further Swedish entry at 90 (Stockholm School of Economics). Sweden, despite of its (relatively small) size is doing amazingly well in the  top 100, especially considering that much larger countries such as France (one entry: INSEAD @ 52)  and the “traditional” stronghold of British institutions on university rankings is also reduced to a single contender: the London Business School (61). Other European countries like Italy, Spain or Germany make no appearance on the list, while the (relatively small) Belgium again has Leuven (56) appearing. What is maybe even the most interesting “country-level” result is the strong showing of the Netherlands: Four universities appear in the top 100: Groningen, (55) Maastricht (60), Wageningen (77) and Erasmus Rotterdam (87). The authors do acknowledge that some of the institutional rankings reported in the article are, of course, very much dependent on sometimes one researcher, citing the example of Richard Oliver as having about as much “citational influence” as the entire department of a Top 25 ranked university. However, even with the limitations of the methodology (which are extensively discussed in the actual article, of course) I wonder what are the “small” countries doing so well that they have such a strong showing in these results? I.e. what are the differences between Swedish, Dutch and Belgian researchers that “we in the larger (European) countries” can learn from? Are the smaller countries simply attracting elite researchers (of which there is no evidence in the article)? Or are they evaluating, prioritising or engaging in research differently – which makes them so phenomenally successful?

Open Access Your Work!

open_accessLast week was Open Access week – the week to celebrate and highlight the amazing amount of research that is being made available through the various open access sources. One of the ways to get open access to published research is through scholars or universities self-archiving their material online. For scholars, this is extremely useful, as it means that articles or other work can be widely distributed – and is not only available to subscribers of a particular journal. This in turn maximises citations – and potential impact of the work.

However, self-archiving is often this is a little tricky, especially if the person doesn’t have a blog or personal website, and/or the university doesn’t provide a self-archiving facility. And even if the person has access to self-archiving, it still means having to figure out what the policies are for each publication the article originally appeared in – and what is ok to make available, and when etc (e.g. many journals have a 12 months embargo on publications before they can be made available via self-archiving)… The good thing is that Mendely, the iTunes for research if you so want, actually allows users to self-archive their own publications – and does so in line with the various policies automatically. All you need to do, is to download Mendely desktop (as if you haven’t done so already!), and drag your own publications to the “My Publications” folder. Mendeley will then make these publications available on your profile website – and presto! Much easier than uploading them to webservers etc – and, of course, they can be found by your colleagues and friends on Mendely. Nifty little trick!

65+ and Active: Headline findings

hund, frau und mann haben spass

Society is getting older – and also less active. With 2012 being the European Year of Active Aging, the importance of remaining active in later life is becoming more at the forefront of policy making – and not a year too soon: In England only 17% of males and 13% of women aged 65-74 are physically active. And inactivity is responsible for an estimated 5-8% of premature deaths in the UK – and costing the NHS an estimated £1,8 billion.

What can be done to increase the activity levels? We recently obtained funding from the British Academy for the Active Plus project looking at this topic from a social marketing perspective. And after the first few focus groups, here are the headline findings I’ll be presenting at the IRSPM in Dublin next week:

Perception Problems

There are major misconceptions about good levels of physical activity – actually not only amongst people who are over 65 – but also amongst care providers. While regular physical activity is particularly important for this age group – many people think that if they haven’t been active all their life there would be little or no benefit in starting in later life.

Relevance of Messages

Many of the messages directed at  increasing physical activity are not considered relevant by people over 65. This includes social marketing messages who often emphasize other benefits then health benefits. The problem that emerged during the focus groups was that many people in the target group were actually more responsive to health centric messages – and that current messages tended to be perceived as for the “younger”. As the  health benefits of exercise are not well understood, clarifying these is a major priority going forward.

Perception of Exercise Itself

Physical symptoms of exercise, i.e. being out of breath or muscle soreness were seen as negative signs – and interpreted as a sign to go slow or stop exercising. This is quite the opposite of many younger people – and again reinforces the need to raise awareness of the health benefits of exercise – and also demonstrate that physical symptoms like being out of breath are not a negative – but rather show that exercise is working.

Media Channels

Advertising was seen as the least effective way to promote messages – and current advertisements were noted – but not found to be relevant or interesting. Better channels included health practitioners raising the topic pro-actively. Amongst media channels, radio programs were seen as effective, especially serials and talk-shows. Several participants also mentioned that there was little depiction of characters in later life engaging in exercise in any of the popular shows in the UK – so there were no real role models.

Branding

Pretty much all participants also pointed out that they were not “old” – and therefore felt that many of the activity programs run by local authorities were not for them – as they frequently branded themselves “for seniors” etc. (a label that was seen by some as even offensive). Many participants felt the positioning should be more subtle – emphasizing well being and staying young – rather than being old.

These findings are based on only a few groups – but so far, from a social marketing perspective, a really interesting story emerges: the preference for health-emphasizing messages rather than promoting other benefits is interesting (and different to many other target groups). Equally, the various barriers and (often wrong) perceptions will be a challenge to overcome.

#altmetrics – Are You Reading Yet?

#altmetricsSocial media has changed market research, making real time “consumer research” possible.  With the growing popularity of #altmetrics (or less twitter-like: alt-metrics) it is also starting to make inroads into measuring (academic) research impact (N.B. for those in the UK: this is not the same as the REF impact – but hey, we only have a few words to chose from!). It addresses a real problem of how to measure research impact, which was extremely slow and often time consuming:  popular measures rely on citation counting (such as average citations per year etc). H-Index for example calculates this for individual authors, ISI Web of Knowledge for journals and so on. The logic is that if something gets cited it is good – the main problem: getting cited takes time, often years (there are some good arguments against this logic, but enlarge I’d say it’s probably a good proxy – given enough time).

With more and more on-line resources available, alt-metrics combines social networking tools and applies this to research. Alt-metrics isn’t in itself a number, but rather a selection of tools, which help create impact, awareness and promise to advance research. Here are a few useful tools for researchers today:

four-ways-to-measure-impact-copy

SSRN has long been a popular tool for “working papers”. It provides views and download data for submitted papers (for example, see this one) – which gives at least a rudimentary estimate of how popular a paper is (or may be).

Another alt-metric is build on a similar premise as social bookmarking – a bit like an academic version of digg if you want. A main advantage over traditional citations is the immediacy of the measure (well, relative immediacy anyway).  Readermeter.org which uses Mendeley data to calculate bookmark rankings for readers – assuming that bookmarking is somewhat similar to expression of esteem or even as good as a virtual citation.

Peerevaluation is a different alt-metric tool – aiming to speed up the peer-review process. The idea is that rather than waiting for weeks on end to get two or three peer-reviews, other website users can review papers more quickly and efficiently. In a way, it’s like crowd-sourcing the peer-review process (which must be welcomed by anyone who has ever encountered an unhelpful reviewer – and who hasn’t encountered one of those?). Let’s hope the site catches on – at the moment I seem to be the only marketing guy there (please join me!)

Existent, and yet-to-be-developed, tools are all potentially useful to increase impact of good research and slowly move away from the sometimes arbitrary and easily manipulated measures used today (such as the Journal Impact Factor – see here), although it will probably take time to become more recognized as a real measure of quality.

So, you want to do a PhD?

phdmadI’m always excited when I get approached as a potential PhD supervisor – but sometimes find that some potential students seem to be confused as to what they need to do (or in fact what a PhD is!). Doing a PhD is a great achievement – and something that takes a bit of planning… especially before approaching potential supervisors. I hope the following points make the process of securing a PhD place a little easier – at least if you are looking for one with me as your supervisor!

What is a good PhD topic?

The main point to remember is that – at least in the UK, and especially in business – a PhD is something that you as the future PhD-holder “owns”. Even if the PhD student ship is part of a larger research grant, it’s important that the topic of your PhD is yours – and not just a write up of what the “main research” is all about (which really wouldn’t be a PhD at all). Almost all universities will require you to submit a Research Proposal with your application, often a short summary of your proposed research (at Hull, this is around 2500 words). Sometimes this can be pretty daunting – especially if you have never written one before (I remember I hated that the most about my PhD!). However, it really shouldn’t be a big hurdle: There are different views on this, but as far as I’m concerned, I’m very happy to give feedback and discuss a research proposal before the formal application. The most important part is probably the Research Question, which should be something that is worth of an extended study and that makes a contribution to the field. While this can sometimes be a simple question – simply giving the question is not enough to be considered a serious research proposal. However, the worthiness of the question should be proven  by conducting a critical Literature Review showing how far the current knowledge has come – and where the gap in the knowledge is (i.e. the research question begins). If you can describe how the knowledge you hope to gain from your research will fit into the wider debate, then that is pretty much perfect.Remember though that the research must be quite focused: three years (or five years part-time) is not a long time to complete the work!

A crucial component of the proposal is the Methodology section. A thorough literature review should really help you a lot in writing this – take some inspiration from people who have done research before you! I often find that this seems the most problematic part – lacking in clarity, justification or simply the proposed research is far to broad to be useful. It’s important to concentrate on what you will do, how you will do it – and if what you are doing is realistic (in terms of time, resources etc). Interviewing experts in 25 countries would be great – but really isn’t realistic. Equally the data you collect must be relevant to the question, and have the potential to answer the question you are proposing – a muddled research question will bite back badly at this stage!

Finally, I’d look for a suggested Timescale. Of course, some things will change during the course of the PhD. But showing a realistic timescale and demonstrating awareness of the various steps involved in carrying out the research emphasizes that you are serious about the research.

Shall we meet?

Somewhat controversially, I’d always encourage having a meeting fairly early on during the PhD application process – even if you are planning on doing the PhD from a different country. The point of such a meeting is that both myself and you should be comfortable with each other – and that we can work on the research proposal together. While theoretically this is possible by never meeting face to face, having a face to face discussion makes things a lot easier. It is, of course, even more important if you want to do the PhD full-time and on site in Hull – but either way, my experience is that once we had a face to face meeting then it’s often easier to work jointly on making the research proposal work both for you as the PhD student and for me as a supervisor (oh, and the university campus in Hull is really pretty nice!).

I hope this little overview was useful. If you are looking to do a PhD, especially in social marketing or cross-cultural marketing – then please get in touch!



Research Mayhem or Mendeley?

mendeleyDisclosure first: I have to admit that I simply don’t like EndNote, at least on a Mac. It’s expensive, tedious, chunky and s..l..o…….w and never seems to do what I want it to do. Of course, what I like even less is having to write reference lists – so frankly I thought I was a stuck between rock and a hard place. I very much liked Papers for the Mac, but despite being a beautiful piece of software, it lacked a couple of real killer features for me: Namely it doesn’t allow citing while writing (the one thing that was useful about EndNote, and what I use most!) and unfortunately, while it was beautiful on the Mac – it does not run on my Windows machine at work (looks great though on the iPad!).
A few weeks ago I stumbled across Mendeley, a reference manager “2.0 style”. It sells itself as a “free reference manager and academic social network”. At first, the social networking features were not my main concern, I rather I wanted an easy to use reference manager that works well with Word, and one that easily worked across platforms. The great news: It does do a great job on both accounts. Importing my existing library from EndNote was easy, and using the Word plugin, I can add bibliographies and citations almost as easy as using EndNote. But, Mendeley also offers a few more hidden features I discovered while using it. Rather than just being a references and citations inserter, users can share documents: Between platforms (e.g. home, office, iPad, iPhone etc) and with each other. A particularly interesting feature in the 2.0 aspect is the potential to create “groups”, where you can share documents amongst other members, and discuss the shared papers. A great tool for collaborative research, for example. Online, Mendeley also has the rather cool “related” articles feature – here’s an example – which shows related papers, presumably based on what readers were reading.
Even more 2.0-ish, and similarly to academia.edu, you can also link up with colleagues or friends and thus “follow” their work, for example by getting informed about new papers they have published.
A great feature – and making Mendeley a real competitor to Papers – is that you can not only work with references, but rather link to whole documents. Like that, you can make sure your entire library of PDFs travels with you wherever you go. An easy way of never forgetting those crucial articles while on the move! Using the integrated viewer in the desktop application, you can view and annotate your files. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to do this (as yet) on the iPad – here I had to open the file using iAnnotate to write notes. Annotating for me this is a crucial thing, even on the move, so having that feature on the mobile devices in future would be great.
Importing new articles (and files) is pretty easy: Mendeley can “watch” folders for your new files (e.g. your download folder) and add them automatically – or you can simply open a PDF file in the application. Mendeley will even attempt to “read” the details and import the file. I have to admit, I found that feature a little sketchy when working with working papers etc…, though for standard journal articles it seems to work well.
A great advantage of Mendeley is that is offers a very generous free version: All in all 500MB storage space, which really should be enough for a quite extensive library. If you want more papers to be kept “in sync” then there are “Pro” options available, starting from £4.99 per months for 3.5 GB “personal” space.
All in all I have to admit that I’m rather pleased I found Mendely – not only because the inserting citations works well on the Mac AND Windows AND using the same library AND it’s basically free , but I also enjoy the other features that Mendeley has (I should add here AND I can say sayonara EndNote!).
Somewhere along the line I still like Papers a lot – and I hear that they are going to release an upgrade soon. So if your main concern is reading papers, you don’t mind the price tag – and work exclusively on a Mac, then Papers is a beautiful piece of software. But if you venture out of the Mac world – or are just a little stingy (like me, presumably!) then Mendeley gives Papers quite something to live up to.
Btw if you decide to join Mendeley – please say hello… My profile is here!