The marketing-academia gap
How big is the gap between marketers and academia?
Turns out, it’s big. “Profound,” even.
A team from Columbia University led by Kamel Jedidi is building an index to measure the relevance of academic papers & journals for marketing practitioners.
For the first step, they built a topic list from 50,000 articles since 1982 in the trades, magazines & newspapers, and rated each topic's popularity. Then they compared that to a sample of 4,000 articles over that same 37 years from four prominent academic journals. (Why those four? Not quite sure.)
What they find is a tale of two cities.
In the ivory tower, empirical estimation, analytical models, and consumer motives are super-hot, but are snoozers for the trade press.
In the trade rags, market orientation, advertising, and marketing strategy are all the rage. Academics give them a big “meh.”
Both groups are mildly into segmentation, financial impact, and consumer culture.
And nobody cares much about persuasion & influence. (Uh, what?!? Paging Dr. Cialdini!)
While the gap has been narrowing over time, it’s still pretty big. (These axes are logarithmic. Yikes!) This study doesn’t ask whether these topics are the "right" topics for anyone to care about. And they didn’t add a third group: marketing practitioners. So maybe the news in the trades is marketing’s version of “better abs!” and “Hugh Jackman finds happiness in work & love.”
Caveats, of course (yay caveats!). But a compelling analysis that’s worth a full read.
PS: Want to bring brand science to your team? Call me. I'm now booking talks & projects for this winter.