marketing science experts

marketing science experts

Advancing the Field of Marketing Science: A Comprehensive Guide

1. Introduction to Marketing Science

Marketing science addresses complex societal issues, which often involves solving a problem that not only advances marketing intelligence and strategy but also uses and extends a new set of marketing and other resources. To focus on the most relevant marketing science problems and to address them with the latest scientific concepts, marketing scientists must adopt an appropriate scientific mindset. We can address a wide range of societal needs by building deeper expertise in the rich marketing research challenges and the next scientific methods. To guide marketing scientists, this introduction provides definitions of the field, integrated elements from popular marketing priority models, enduringly powerful abstract concepts, and research spotlight examples of societal needs that will likely stimulate marketing priority challenges.

The integrated marketing science elements provide a partial but growing answer to the question: how can collective experts leverage resources to advance marketing science knowledge, addressing societal problems and make the discipline more important? These elements may help initiate a research agenda and can help us demonstrate to our colleagues and students, as well as to ourselves, the magnitude of marketing science needs facing a long learning curve with uncertain outcomes. We often advocate for sustainability, data-driven and personalized markets, and that marketing science can contribute to this growth. We can learn from different scientific perspectives that address similar and related needs. Then we can address existing manifest needs, new marketing priority research challenges, and continue to create advances for a better future.

2. Key Theories and Concepts in Marketing Science

Understanding key concepts and theories concerning consumption, markets, and marketing is critical for contributing to marketing science. The essence of marketing is buying and selling. Broadly speaking, marketing is a method of satisfying social material needs and is also a scientific discipline that studies how to use market resources in an effective manner. Marketing models the process of people identifying and satisfying material and cultural needs through exchange relationships. From the earliest days, the production and commercialization process is the means by which a marketing system is built, sustained, and developed. It is both the content and the basic driving force of any marketing system. Products and services, prices, distribution, advertising, and sales are the tools and means to carry out the production and commercialization processes of the marketing system.

To more systematically apply the marketing concept to the consumer world and the interconnected business world, insightful people constantly create new concepts and theories and connect them with the original economic, psychological, management, sociology, and anthropology theories. This remarkable effort not only enhances the scientific foundation of the discipline of marketing but also contributes to the common prosperity of modern society.

3. Research Methodologies in Marketing Science

This chapter provides a comprehensive guide to the research methodologies used in the field of marketing science. The methods described come from different fields, and a variety of techniques are used in marketing research. The chapter introduces the basic concepts of research and provides a set of questions researchers in marketing science should ask before engaging in a study. Topics covered include experimental designs in marketing, surveys, discrete choice, measurement, and specialized sampling issues. Traditional statistical methods are introduced and described, and the chapter also includes comparisons of the different methodologies, as well as more detailed information on frequently used techniques in marketing, such as conjoint and factor analysis.

In general, research guidelines are critical and need to be introduced at the highest levels of research in organizations. Within marketing science, the researchers’ motive to research its methods is primarily for improving managerial decision making. The motivation for these steps is typically to hone the practical knowledge of marketing scientists so that they know what to look for to understand and anticipate marketing challenges and identify appropriate methods for their resolution. This leads to another specific fundamental goal that is a part of the understanding and the related judicious use of the appropriate statistical methodology. To increase the quality of knowledge development, many educational guidelines are often available for those who wish to obtain specific knowledge in research methods. These guidelines are usually quite specific about the statistical principles that could be relevant. Many resources are available to those who have a desire to expand their methodological toolkit.

4. Applications and Case Studies in Marketing Science

This chapter aims to show the current and potential future applications of Marketing Science, with a set of representative problems that come from the real world. By means of this brief overview, we embark on the odyssey of researching highly complex situations that are present in different fields, and typically need to be analyzed together. These problems may come from a diverse range of areas including, but not limited to, sales, revenue, segment performance and promotion planning, effectiveness of commercial approach, assortment management, inventory management and stockouts, demand forecasting, marketing mix, and advertising and media planning.

To develop our analysis, we use big data techniques, such as collaborative learning, reinforcement learning, predictive modeling, optimization, and recommendation systems among others. The algorithms allow us to make commercial decisions in both sales and marketing that could have an important impact at the category and P&L level, as well as at the financial level. On the basis of the different problems encountered, we are enhancing our data mining and machine learning methods and creating consolidated algorithms for analyzing these problems. We provide a review of the most promising commercial applications. A number of success cases are considered for each application, ranging from business performance improvement to insight discovery. These could offer us new opportunities to acquire variable knowledge and different learning processes, and should enable us to propose new practical research methodologies of Marketing Science.

5. Emerging Trends and Future Directions in Marketing Science

In the previous sections, we reviewed the historical development of marketing science, highlighted key research areas, and provided a comprehensive guide to the processes of paper development, paper publication, and the reviewing of manuscripts. In this last section, we discuss emerging trends and future directions for marketing science in four areas: (1) Data and Measurement, (2) Consumers, Demand, and Marketing Communications, (3) Firms, Markets, and Marketing Channels, and (4) Modeling and Methodology. These discussions are based on a clear and important limitation of our previous review: we have focused on the marketing manuscripts published in the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Consumer Research, and Marketing Science. While we believe that these articles provide insights into the “leading edge” of our past work, we also believe that the future of marketing science needs to take these insights to the broad spectrum of marketing-related problems that our discipline seeks to explain. Moreover, the rise of big data and digitization have enabled the exploration of new datasets, level of (individual) heterogeneity and dynamics.

We argue that working with big data requires careful attention to existing biases. Unbiasedness, which is something of a norm in our field, has its limits when we work with purchased data or actual consumer feedback. In the case of experiments over social media platforms, most entries are biased based on sentiments, emotions, etc. Research on marketing questions hitherto unexplored requires big data, but the biggest data is sometimes weakened by bias. Our section on new data and measurement methods opens by considering the data market. The next four contributions offer detail in diverse marketing contexts regarding consumer choice and evaluation. The papers in this Special Issue advance B2B research by providing methodological and substantive tweaks that allow for the study of large-scale, firm-specific factors. As such, they bring B2B research into the vernacular of what might be labeled the big-data revolution. Data science has the ability to be a transformative force within the field, and that transformation is long overdue.