Recommendations to Stimulate Integrative Research

Advice from Michel Wedel’s Irwin-McGraw-Hill Distringuished Marketing Educator Award Acceptance Speech

Delivered at the AMA Winter Academic Conference Award Luncheon, February 23, 2019.

Integrative research does not rely on a single paradigm to determine what should be studied, how it should be studied, how results should be interpreted, or how research should be evaluated.

Identifies core questions important to multiple (sub)disciplines, applies principles and theories from one domain to others, identifies underlying mechanisms, and validates and replicates results with fundamentally different data and methodologies, to predict and positively influence consumer and firm decision making.

Recommendations to Stimulate Integrative Research

• Create career and funding opportunities for integrative research that can answer questions that other research cannot.
• Promote a broad and historical perspective in PhD. education that develops an understanding of various paradigms and their limitations.
• Work in teams of investigators who contribute knowledge from very different areas of expertise.
• Publishing venues, editorial boards, professional associations, and conferences need to cut across disciplines and specialties.
• Research should be evaluated on its own merit and contribution to marketing instead of based on paradigms prevalent in basic disciplines.
• Create publicly available databases and make software available.
  • As a research community, we share in the responsibility to remove the barriers to integrative research.
  • The initial burden often must fall upon leaders in the field.

Integration has been one of the guiding principles in my work as a scholar, teacher, and in my editorial roles. I hope to inspire others to adopt this principle as well.

Michel Wedel, Distinguished University Professor and PepsiCo Chair in Consumer Science
at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland