Update note: Sorry I was made aware that the links in the article did not work properly. The problems have been fixed.
If you have been reading my blog for a while, I hope you have come to the conclusion that the type of research marketing academics do is more than just nerdy math or lab experiments. It can be highly relevant to marketing practice. In my career as a marketing professor, I have collaborated successfully with businesses large and small. Such collaborations have been highly gratifying for both the businesses and I. If your business has not been tapping into the marketing academic community around you, you may be missing a great opportunity for knowledge discovery and innovation. In this article, I would like to offer some advice on how to leverage the academic community around you.
Why Collaborate with the Academic Community?
There are many benefits to collaborating with the academic community. I will highlight some of the key benefits here:
- Access to cutting-edge research methods and tools that you and your staff may not be well versed in. Examples include sophisticated data analytic models, complex experimental design, clever primary data collection methods, etc.;
- Building reliable and generalizable knowledge based on validated theories rather than just a hunch;
- Designing and conducting rigorous scientific tests to yield high-quality results that you can trust;
- Gaining a fresh, non-conventional way of looking at your problem because of different academic vs. practitioner thinking styles;
- Cost savings compared to hiring external consultants, as many academics’ primary motivation is to publish instead of monetary goals. The mantra in the academic community is Publish or Perish!
What Type of Questions?
If you are convinced that your business can benefit from academic collaboration, the next step is to figure out what issue to tackle through such a project. In my experience, the questions best answered through academic collaboration are ones of strategic importance with a medium time horizon of one to three years. Some good examples are:
- Establishing effective measurement of ROI for certain marketing activities (e.g., social media) and determining optimal resource allocation;
- Creating new data analytic models to leverage various customer data;
- Innovative customer segmentation and optimal messaging to each segment;
- Modeling customer lifetime value and attrition likelihood for each customer;
- Benchmarking the quality of customer experience and identifying key opportunities for improvement;
- Improving website performance such as increasing conversion rate, reducing abandonment rate, etc.;
- Designing rigorous experiments and identifying data needs for new initiatives (e.g., mobile app development)
I should also note questions that are not particularly suitable for academic collaboration. One type is what I call a “putting out fire” situation. If an issue is super urgent that you need a solution in a week or a month, it is probably too fast-paced for the typical academic collaboration. The other type involves pure implementational tasks. For example, if you are looking for someone to clean your customer data, that’s probably a job better for a hands-on consultant than an academic. There are exceptions to this, however, as some academic institutions have established research collaboration centers and may have the resources to tackle such a problem.
As you select the right question to answer, it is important to remember what I said earlier about the Publish or Perish mantra for academics. We need to be able to publish academic research papers from such a collaboration. The topics for the papers may not coincide with the exact question that you are answering. That is completely OK. What you can do to make such a collaborative project more appealing is to offer rich data for analytical use and opportunities for first-hand data collection through field experiments and surveys.
How to Find Potential Collaborators?
If you want the best talent without geographic or personal limitations, I would suggest you start with some of the best academic journals to identify people with the expertise you need. A particularly good one to start with is the Journal of Marketing, a top academic marketing journal with a strong practice focus. Look through the papers published in there and identify ones that address a related problem. The authors for those papers may be good collaborators.
Another source is established research centers at business schools around the country/world. For example, the Customer Analytics and Strategy Collaboratory I am directing at Old Dominion University focuses on customer data analytics; the Institute for the Study of Business Markets at Penn State specializes in B2B marketing; and the Center for Connected Customers at George Washington University is known for their work on Internet of Things.
If you are not so comfortable venturing out that far yet or if you prefer a more face-to-face setting, there may be faculty in the universities around you that have the expertise you need. Most research-oriented universities will have faculty information pages that lists the research interests and expertise of their faculty. Go to their marketing department or business school website and look for faculty directory or faculty listing.
Expected Resource Commitments
From a financial perspective, the costs associated with an academic collaboration project ranges from being free all the way to the typical prices charged by an external consultant. But most of the time you will find the price tag to be somewhere in between. For the Customer Analytics and Strategy Collaboratory, we have quoted projects from a few thousand dollars for a straightforward small-scope project to upwards of $50K for a large comprehensive project involving multiple sub-projects. You can help bring the price down some if you have something interesting and unique to offer, such as rich and unique data sets or ability to collect data from a hard-to-access population (e.g., executives). At the moment, for example, data related to mobile marketing are in high demand. Multichannel data connecting behavior across channels and across time are also highly sought after.
Besides financial commitments, obviously you also need to be prepared to devote some time and energy into working with your collaborator. It typically involves a few startup meetings to discuss the business background and to identify the proper scope of the project. Once the project is under way, you’ll want to have a central contact person to get answers about specific details that the academic(s) may need. Check-in meetings at preset points during a project are also helpful to keep the project on track. Finally, for a data analytic project, a data specialist will need to be on-hand to assist in data extraction and answer data questions.
What You Need to Know about Research Publications
As I mentioned earlier, academics want to be able to publish their work. Some of you may be concerned about losing your competitive advantage by revealing ideas to the public. Fortunately, academic publications are at a more abstract/theoretical level, and the concern about revealing your specific ideas is fairly minimal. You can always request to review a paper before it is submitted for publication. In addition, academic publications have a much longer publication cycle of two or more years, giving you a head start that is typically more than sufficient in the marketing world.
If privacy is your concern, it is always possible to remain anonymous in a publication. Some companies like to be named for the good publicity that it brings. It is completely your call. You can also request data descriptives (e.g., customer retention rate, average lifetime value, etc.) to be masked to protect your business information.
Student Collaborations
Before wrapping up, I want to point out an alternative for those of you who may not have the resources to commit to a faculty project: working with faculty through student projects. Many marketing classes have a group project component. For example, in my Web Analytics class, my students have worked with different companies’ Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics data to answer very specific business questions. In some other classes, our students have also developed marketing plans, conducted marketing research projects, and designed social media plans. We also offer a semester-long class called Practical Marketing Solutions, where the students work exclusively on a real-world problem over the course of a semester.
Since such projects are work from students who are still learning about the subject, be prepared that it may not be as in-depth or as polished as a faculty project. However, students are great at creative thinking. So if you are looking for creative ideas, targeting a younger age audience, or using a technology platform popular among the younger generation, student projects may be particularly suitable. It is also a low- to no-cost alternative to get some initial answers.
After reading this article, I hope you will start to think about how your business can collaborate with academics. It is really a rich world of opportunities that many businesses are not aware. The points I discussed here are the basics to get you started. If you want to read more about working with the academic world, check out this book: Academic-Practitioner Relationships: Developments, Complexities and Opportunities. Happy collaborating!