The Customer Knowledge Advantage

As I noted in my last post, the American Marketing Association’s Advanced Research Techniques Forum took place in San Francisco the second week in June (June 6-9).  The program is an intentional mix of presentations from academic researchers and market research practitioners.  While the practitioner presentations are often more interesting, at least from the standpoint of a fellow practitioner, this year the best and most useful presentations either came from the academic side or had significant contribution from one or more academic researchers.  In that last post I wrote about three papers that explored different aspects of social media.  Three more papers from this year’s ART make my list of the most worthwhile presentations. (more…)

The 20th occurrence of the Advanced Research Techniques Forum, an annual conference sponsored by the American Marketing Association, took place in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago (June 6-9).  For those of you not familiar with A/R/T, this conference brings academic researchers together with market research practitioners in a format that produces (nearly) equal representation of contributions from each of these two groups.  Half of the twenty presentation slots are reserved for “practitioner” papers (where the lead author is not an academic researcher) and half are held for papers from academics.  One of these academic slots is assigned to the winner of the annual Paul Green award for the best article published in Journal of Marketing Research in the previous calendar year.  More papers than in the past are collaborations between academics and practitioners, and choice of one or the other as lead author can impact the chances of getting on the program given the limited number of slots.

The program is assembled by a committee comprised of academics and practitioners (disclaimer–I’ve been on the committee a few times and was program chair for 2008).  In a typical year, the call for papers might yield around 70 submissions.   In addition to the presented papers, “poster” presentations are considered, and the program includes optional tutorials (extra cost) before and after the main conference sessions.

The A/R/T papers, especially those presented by academic researchers, can be dragged down by the weight of too much algebra.  Over the years, the “advanced” has more often referred to “models” than to “research techniques” in general, and this year was no exception.  Still, there were a few presentations that are noteworthy. (more…)