Coxswaining the Practitioner’s Research Agenda: How B2B Marketing Academics Can Really Transform Business and Society

Many scholars and practitioners question whether business to business (B2B) marketing scholars can really address practitioner challenges and thus have societal value. Digitalization, artificial intelligence, and big data disrupt the B2B work environment in unprecedented ways. Indeed, practitioners operate in increasingly complex, dynamic, and ambiguous settings where answers are needed swiftly and expediently. This need stands in sharp contrast to the work conventions of marketing scholars who generally spend many years on a research project before it lands in a top-tier academic journal. The obvious issue here is that marketing scholars produce insights for a ship that has already sailed. Scholars have ingeniously solved the issue for themselves by focusing on generalizable mechanisms, theories, and solutions, however, this approach suffers from producing less practical guidelines. Consequently, practitioners tend to rely more on gut-feeling, ad hoc research and highly-paid consultants (and less on academics), which produces fast but less rigorous results. The question is whether marketing scholars can execute relevant and interesting research, in a fast and rigorous manner. Ideally, as I will explain in this chapter, marketing scholars need to abandon the reactive scholarly research approach and instead take the driver’s seat in transforming business and society, which is the research agenda that I propose.