BALANCING THEORY WITH HOT TOPIC RELEVANT RESEARCH

Andrew StephenUniversity of Pittsburgh

What is a “hot” topic?

Novelty – to academics, practitioners

Important, relevant,

meaningful

Lots of open questions

Lots of buzz about it

BUT BE CAREFUL…

• A hot topic worthy of academic research needs to allow for scholarly theory building and testing

• It is great to listen to marketing practitioners to get a sense of what’s important to them…but realize that what’s “hot” about a “hot topic” in their minds might not be relevant in a scholarly context– E.g., “big data”

• Be inspired and intrigued by what’s happening “out there” but bring scholarly thinking and frameworks to bear on interesting “hot” real-world phenomena

A GOOD MIX OF “HOT” IN PRACTICE AND IN ACADEMIA

THEORY?

• Problem with “hot” topics, particularly the novel ones, is that you probably don’t have an established theory that you can use

• Really?

• There’s got to be something out that there that helps understand/explain the phenomenon of interest– Prior literature in marketing – Literature in other fields– Your own “theories”

(sort of)

• Thought of like a virtual shopping mall

• Shopping mall research on retail demand externalities

• Apply similar concepts to this new phenomenon and context

• Find analogies

• Mobile display ads – new and not well understood

• What makes an ad effective?

• Used “old” theory of persuasion and info processing (ELM) to explain differences in effectiveness

• Generate hypotheses based on existing theory and test them in the hot/new context

• Some studies showed how using Facebook boosted self esteem

• Non-social media literature links self esteem with lower self control

• Combine effects or theories from prior literature to understand novel context

FINAL THOUGHTS• Beauty (hotness) is in the eye of the beholder – almost any marketing or

consumer phenomenon could be construed as a hot topic or positioned as one– Don’t do research on hot topics because they are hot– Work on topics that you care about and that you think are meaningful and relevant

• Easy to get carried away with novel/new/hot areas (and cool datasets!) and not pay much attention to the theory side of things– Most of us have been in this situation– It is okay to use substantive/practical aspects of a project to inform theory

development– But you must have theory even if the contribution is substantive – goal is to explain

something, not merely describe it

• Theory can come from a variety of sources– Prior literature in unrelated contexts that somehow applies (analogies)– Prior literature on generally related topics (application to new context)– Prior literature in same/related contexts (combining and extending)– Or something brand new!

+ THEORY

GREAT RESEARCH