Review of Marketing Research: Special Issue – Marketing Legends: Volume 8

Review of Marketing Research, now in its eighth volume, is a fairly recent publication covering the important areas of marketing research with a more comprehensive state-of-the-art orientation. The chapters in this publication review the literature in a particular area, offer a critical commentary, develop an innovative framework, and discuss future developments, as well as present specific empirical studies. All the eight volumes have featured some of the top researchers and scholars in our discipline who have reviewed an array of important topics. The response to the first seven volumes has been truly gratifying, and we look forward to the impact of the eighth volume with great anticipation. This eighth volume is unique in that it is exclusively devoted to marketing legends and features the work of all the legends named to date.

Any career is marked by luck, both good and bad, as well as by hard work interspersed by times of uncertainty, fits and starts, and learning from one's mistakes and successes. But beyond these outcomes and actions, I owe an enormous debt to people who have shaped me and made life the challenging and rewarding journey it is. My family of origin and extended family were incredibly supportive in personal and functional ways. So many mentors and teachers influenced what I know and who I am. Many students, colleagues, secretaries, computer and library staff, and group chairs and deans provided the help, inspiration, and friendship guiding my career behind the scenes. My wife, son, and daughter sustained me through times of tears and joy, as did my community of faith. All these relationships were foundational to any contributions I may have made to attitudes, social action, and theory of mind; methodology, statistics, and philosophical foundations of research; sales force, organization, and health behaviors; emotions, ethics, and moral behavior; and marketing and managerial practice. For me, my career contributions are secondary to the relationships within which I was fortunate to engage.

The Legends in Marketing series presents compilations of the seminal works of marketing scholars who have made significant contributions to the discipline of marketing. This review discusses the structure and contents of the volumes that comprise Legends in Marketing: Shelby D. Hunt (Sage, forthcoming).

The author describes how he entered the marketing field and describes his contributions in four sections: articles written, books published, students nurtured, and executives consulted and trained. He describes his contributions to the marketing field in nine areas: marketing theory and orientations, improving the role and practice of marketing, analytical marketing, the social and ethical side of marketing, globalization and international marketing competition, marketing in the new economy, creating and managing the product mix, strategic marketing, and broadening the concept and application of marketing.

Over the past 25 years as a marketing academic, I have been fortunate to have collaborated with various researchers and firms and have contributed to the advancement of the marketing field. This is a review article that tracks my progress through these years that has led me to explore different areas of marketing, thereby shaping me as a researcher and an academic. As I see now, all of my research work can be viewed from a decision-making point of view – decisions that marketers can make either at the market, brand/firm/store, or the customer level. These decisions have in turn been transformed into strategies or tactics leading up to successful implementations and improved bottom-line results. The development of strategies/tactics and successful implementations can be seen in nearly 10 areas of research that I have involved myself in. This article also highlights how my research studies have contributed and advanced the creation of knowledge in each of these research areas.

It is a great honor to be selected as a marketing legend, and 117 of my refereed journal articles are published in nine volumes by Sage India as part of the Legend series. In this chapter, I discuss my preparation for an academic career and the trajectory my research has followed. I reflect on my research contributions to marketing by selectively summarizing the key contributions in each of the nine volumes and draw out some lessons and principles I have learned in the process.

This chapter traces the development of the pricing research program of Kent Monroe, beginning with his doctoral dissertation and continuing to the present time. Drawing on psychophysics and adaptation-level theory the early research efforts concentrated on validating two important concepts relative to behavioral pricing research: reference price and acceptable price range. Then the behavioral pricing research program expanded to explore how the context of a purchase situation, including the structure of the prices available for judgment, influences buyers' price perceptions and willingness to buy. In the early years his research included pricing models and research on patronage behavior. Subsequently, concentrating primarily on behavioral pricing research, he began to integrate findings from the research program into examining how various sellers pricing strategies and tactics influence buyers' judgments and purchase decisions. These efforts led to the first edition of his book Pricing – Making Profitable Decisions published in 1979. The book was subsequently revised and expanded in 1990 and again in 2003.

This article attempts to synthesize the contributions of Jagdish Sheth to the discipline. This is done by following the development of the field in various subdisciplines such that one can observe the impact Sheth's thinking has had on the field. This is the career of an “accidental marketer” who started as a social scientist, got interested in buyer behavior, and made his mark in that field. Noticing similarities between organizational buyer behavior and individual buyer behavior, he ventured into that field too. As a visionary, he started developing theories in international marketing in the seventies, which was a popular area that time. Similarly, he published a handbook on Customer Relationship Marketing and worked in the area before it became a major area of emphasis. As a multifaceted person, he has contributed to the practitioners through books and consulting projects. However, this article focuses mainly on his academic contributions including his research, teaching/mentoring, and his philanthropic activities.

The chapter briefly reviews the eight volumes in my Legend series – organizational buying behavior, consumer behavior, product and new product management, marketing strategy, market segmentation, global marketing, marketing research and modeling, and the future of marketing. In addition, the chapter highlights the three driving forces of much of my research: (a) the real world challenges facing corporations and organizations, (b) the search for new methodological developments, and (c) the continuous challenge of the prevailing marketing concepts and approaches. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the evolution of marketing in the past five decades and my wish list for the discipline and my future activities.

This article describes several lessons learned during my career. Some describe ways of approaching intellectual issues and others express values and attitudes underlying these approaches. Although the lessons have evolved in a largely academic context, they seem equally appropriate in the world of practice. The personal rules of thumb and ideas inherent in these lessons are typically developed and practiced implicitly. However, readers should find these explicit statements relevant in different ways. Some lessons might be candidates for adoption outright. Others might be constructive points of departure for evolving a related lesson better suited to one's own working style. All lessons, whether or not they are agreeable or appropriate, can serve as thought starters by challenging readers to surface their own implicit career lessons for comparison.