December 12, 2010 by Robert Kozinets.

This blog is getting some “red hot” editorial news about the State of Marketing Scholarship these days. My last post broke the news about the new editorial team at the Journal of Consumer Research (”JCR”).

And here is a very fresh one about the #1 Journal in the Marketing field.

As many of you are aware Gary Frazier is the editor elect of the Journal of Marketing (or “JM”) and will be taking over in July of 2011 from Ajay Kohli. For a while, Ajay, Gary, and Bob Leone have acted as co-editors of the journal. As with JCR, the manuscripts flows in the main journals in our field have been increasing dramatically, necessitating some editorial action to share the workload.

Gary has decided to change the structure of the Journal of Marketing to one that includes Associate Editors (or “AEs”). I think this is a very smart move. AEs at JM will have considerable latitude to make recommendations, but the final decision will always lie with the Editor-in-Chief, that is, Gary. Gary has appointed 16 AEs, some truly excellent people, and I believe he is looking for a couple more.

Gary has asked me to be an Associate Editor of JM for his term and I have happily accepted. Thank you for the vote of confidence, Gary.

What this means, I believe, is that the Journal of Marketing is institutionalizing a role and a place for Consumer Culture Theory, cultural, or “qualitative” approaches to practical marketing issues in the field. This is big news. It is something that many of us in the CCT field have been working towards for many years. More top tier options for our publications is important to continuing the institutionalization of CCT work as an important and necessary (albeit minority) component of all Marketing Scholarship, Marketing Education, and Marketing Departments.

At the #1 journal in the Marketing field, we now have, perhaps more than ever before, the promise of a real presence and solidified representation at the top of the field.

I think that a look at the past 7 years of cultural work in JM will show that CCT work is getting more and more applied, and offering increasingly powerful pragmatic insights to the marketing industry.

The move is also presenting  a natural place for all types of social media and social media marketing research. One of my personal goals is to raise the quality and profile of research on social media and social media marketing research.

Officially, these will be the areas of the Journal of Marketing that I will have Associate Editor authority over:

Primary (substantive) content area

Internet and social media marketing

Secondary content areas

1. Word-of-mouth marketing;
2. entertainment marketing;
3. brand and product management;
4. retailing

Methods: 

• Qualitative/ethnographic (e.g., discourse analysis, semiotics, phenomenological interviews, metaphor analysis),
• Other methodological orientations as necessary (I am trained and versed in a variety of different methods)
  

If you do social media research using qualitative methods, you can pretty much guess who is going to be shepherding your work though JM.

So starting in July I will be looking forward to seeing all your best managerially-oriented work sent to us at the Journal of Marketing. I will do my very best to make sure it gets treated fairly or even better, and to publish the best work to keep our field of Marketing moving steadily forward.

Posted in Qualitative Research Methods, Academic Life, Economy and General Business Management, Ethnography, Consumer Culture Theory, Conferences & Presentation, Entertainment Marketing, Marketing News & Insights, Communities and Tribes, Word of Mouth Marketing, Marketing Research, Marketing Science | Print | 3 Comments »

December 7, 2010 by Robert Kozinets.

I have been on the JCR Policy Board for about a year, representing the American Anthropological Association.This has been my first time going through the process of electing a new Editor, or Editorial Team.

In this case, I want to say that we had two team running for the Editorship and both teams were really outstanding. It was extremely difficult to choose one team as better than the other. What I can say is that I am very happy with this choice. I think the new editors will do an extremely good job, be very fair, very devoted, and very enthusiastic. If you like the way JCR is running right now, I think you are going to be pleased with the way it will continue running.

Here is the full official announcement going over the communications transom right now. I’ve been authorized to spread the word, so here goes…

“The Journal of Consumer Research Policy Board is pleased to announce that Mary Frances Luce, Ann L. McGill, and Laura Peracchio have been named coeditor-designates of the Journal of Consumer Research.  The new team, whose three-year term begins July 1, 2011, replaces John Deighton, who has served as editor-in-chief since July 2005.   We gratefully acknowledge John’s service, as well as his team of editors for the last three years-Deborah MacInnis, Ann McGill, and Baba Shiv.

Mary Frances Luce is the Thomas A. Finch Jr. Professor of Marketing at The Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs.  Professor Luce’s expertise is in consumer behavior, medical decision-making, and the effects of negative emotion on decision behavior. Her teaching interests center on health care marketing.  Luce received her Ph.D. in Business Administration from Duke University and has held previous appointments at the Wharton School of Business.  Luce’s research has appeared in such publications as Journal of Consumer Research, Health Psychology, Management Science, and Marketing Science.  She also co-authored Emotional Decisions:  Tradeoff Difficulty and Coping in Consumer Choice. In 2003, she was Co-Chair of the Association for Consumer Research Conference, and she currently serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Consumer Research.  She has received research grants from the National Science Foundation and the Marketing Science Institute.

Ann L. McGill is the Sears Roebuck Professor of General Management, Marketing, and Behavior Science at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago.   Professor McGill’s research focus is consumer and manager decision making, with special emphasis on causal reasoning, consumer evaluations of products and services consumed alone or with others, the influence of freedom of choice on outcome satisfaction, and product and brand anthropomorphism.  McGill has held teaching positions at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and New York University.   Besides teaching and advising several PhD candidates, McGill is an editor of the Journal of Consumer Research and in 2008, she was Co-Chair of the Association for Consumer Research Conference.  McGill won the 2005 McKinsey Award for Excellence in Teaching at the University of Chicago.   She received a BBA with high distinction from the University of Michigan, and an MBA and a PhD from Chicago Booth.

Laura Peracchio is Professor of Marketing at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. Professor Peracchio received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University and a dual BA and BSE from the Wharton School and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.  Peracchio’s areas of research interest are focused on consumer information processing including food and nutrition issues, visual persuasion, and language and culture. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, and Journal of Advertising. Peracchio is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Consumer Psychology and has served as President of the Society for Consumer Psychology. She was awarded the Society for Consumer Psychology’s Inaugural Distinguished Service Award and research awards from the American Marketing Association, the Marketing Science Institute, and the Journal of Consumer Research. Peracchio’s teaching focuses on nonprofit marketing, social and public policy issues, and consumer behavior.

The Policy Board was very impressed with the proposal submitted by Professors Luce, McGill, and Peracchio.  They are all highly respected scholars and long-time contributors to JCR and to the consumer research community more broadly.  Ann is currently an editor of JCR, and all three have served as area-editors and members of the JCR editorial review board.  The team brings great energy to the editorial position, and under their direction we expect to see JCR’s influence broaden and strengthen among researchers interested in all aspects of consumption behavior.  In addition, the team has excellent ideas for promoting interdisciplinary research within JCR.   The field of consumer research will continue to develop in important ways under this team’s scholarly leadership.

The JCR Policy Board is comprised of representatives of eleven organizations.  Current members of the Policy Board are Itamar Simonson (American Marketing Association), Rob Kozinets (American Anthropological Association), Linda L. Price (American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences), Barbara Bickart (American Association for Public Opinion Research), Juliet Schor (American Sociological Association), Michel Wedel (American Statistical Association), John Lynch (Association for Consumer Research), Leigh McAlister (INFORMS), Ronald Faber (International Communication Association), Durairaj Maheswaran (Society for Consumer Psychology), and Norbert Schwarz (Society for Personality and Social Psychology).

Posted in Academic Life, Consumer Culture Theory, Conferences & Presentation, Communities and Tribes, Marketing News & Insights, Marketing Science | Print | 2 Comments »

November 30, 2010 by Robert Kozinets.

Dear President Obama:

It was really nice when social media was your special friend, wasn’t it? When you had your Facebook page and everyone lauded it, you were the social media President, the social media guy. People saidf you had “cracked the code” on using social media for politics, people wrote books and reports about how you had won the Presidency by “getting” social media when very few people and companies go it, and everything was great.

But now social media is not your special friend any more, is it?

As the major media have been ceaselessly reporting, “a cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables, most of them from the past three years, provides an unprecedented look at back-room bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats” (NY Times, Nov 28, Shane and Lehren article).

Social media changes everything.

Social media isn’t just about fan pages, Mr. President. It isn’t just about organizing your supporters. It most certainly isn’t like chain mail, that can just “amplify” a social (”Change”) or campaign (”Vote”) message. Not in the big picture analysis. It isn’t just about marketing. Not really. Where you did get it right, President Obama, and where there is still lots of hope, I believe, is that the key to your campaign’s use of social media-although it has disappointingly dropped off in your years in the Oval Office-is that it was always about Empowerment.

Edelman wrote a nice report about the Obama campaign’s use of social media that hammered home how it used social media to empower its supporters. Here are its principles:

1. Laddering support through tiers of engagement
2. Empowering super users
3. Providing source materials for user-generated content
4. Going where the people are
5. Using tools people are familiar with
6. Ensuring that people can find your content
7. Mobilizing supporters through mobile devices
8. Harnessing analytics to constantly improve engagement activities
9. Building the online operation to scale

Those are good solid marketing lessons, good social media marketing lessons, too. But here’s a new lesson for the books, Mr. President: Empowerment cuts both ways. Wikileaks is doing this, too. And here is another one: social media changes everything.

What I mean is that, for you, and for others in power like corporate executives and heads of nonprofit companies, and leaders of all shapes and sizes, social media is like someone coming and peeling a wall from your house and one from your office, replacing them with two panes of glass, setting up deckchairs on your lawn, and inviting everyone to come take turns watching you. The same ability to get into people’s living rooms means they are peering into your living room, too.

You want “Transparency”? In the social media world, you’ve got it. “Control of the message”? Well, that’s a whole other thing.

Here is the dilemma. What Wikileaks did and keeps doing is a major headache and a major embarrassment. You, Hilary, and your State Department staff must be apologizing like jostled Canadians at this point. Maybe it is more than a headache. Almost certainly the site is breaking some laws by “publishing” such private governmental information. Should it be shut down? Crushed like Napster or Pirate Bay (sorry).

I don’t think so. What the major press has also picked up is that this gargantuan leak is also an incredible opportunity for anyone to take a peek, as deep a peek as they like, into the way American diplomacy is done. It is a window thrown open onto something that was previously backdoor. And in a real democracy, that is incredibly value, because it spurs examination, self-examination, and real “Change” (remember that word, Mr. President? It used to be your friend, too).

According to Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, the site will release a treasure trove of documents early next year that will show a big US bank engaging in “flagrant violations” and “unethical practices” and trigger all sorts of regulatory examination. And as the finance industry goes, it is no doubt that other industries will follow. A parade of companies will follow, their leaders hung out to dry, naked and vulnerable with their expletives undeleted, their decision-making  and moral stances fully exposed (anyone remember the Ford Pinto? How about the Toyota scandal?)

Social media changes business in more ways that marketing. It is a painful transition. It is going to be wrenching. We are just feeling the first death thrashes of the old, secretive system. But in the long run, truth and consistency are good things.

Mr. President, please be careful as you consider the question of whether to shut Wikileaks down, or limit its ability to reveal.

Let’s be honest. It isn’t like this is the first time you have tried to control social media, President Obama. Most people have already forgotten how you got into a public argument with Joe Anthony, an early supporter of you. Mr. Anthony was advanced enough in social media to start a MySpace page with your name on it, to support your bid to become a candidate for President, before you did. He gathered 130,000 friends for you. You then went straight to the authorities at MySpace and had them turn the page over to your campaign so you could take control of it. Oops. No thank you, no apology, just “that’s mine-I control that.”

 That old school, heavy handed technique did not work. The followers rebelled. It got nasty. It took a real, personal apology and a lot of effort to get people back and on board.

You learned your lesson that time. Please remember it this time. Let the secrets keep flowing until you learn how to manage them. Let the information get out until frontstage and backstage are consistent. Let the people know how you really govern, not just how you say you govern. Please don’t just be a politician. It is clearly not what the people want from you. Learn from the mistakes to lead with inspiring integrity and truly empower.

And let social media change everything.

Posted in Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Consumer Culture Theory, Activism, Economy and General Business Management, Communities and Tribes, Word of Mouth Marketing, Technology, Marketing News & Insights | Print | 1 Comment »