Mapping The Discipline Of Marketing

The development of marketing discipline has a history of more than a century years, but the scientific research on marketing only has a history of fifty years. The discipline of Marketing had been developed based on the discipline of economics, and the scientific research schema of marketing has been considered deep impacted by the discipline of psychology. In more than fifty years of scientific research, it has been evaluated continuously by marketing scholars holding a positive and confirmed viewpoint to track the developing situation and trend of researches. However, with the continuous expansion of the research participators and the growing research outputs, it has become increasingly difficult to get to know the state of the development through the traditional methods of reading the published marketing literature carefully. Begin at the twenty-first century, along with the more and more expanded international marketing academia, negative and critical voices have appeared as one falls another rises, scholars from Europe and Australia had criticized that the academic marketing research was not international enough, and scholars from the United States had considered the marketing academic research was currently gone into division and decline. Despite the critical voices, what is the whole status of marketing academic researches was rarely showed, this study try to explore the status quo and development trend of overall marketing academic research and answer the doubts from academia and find the direction for the future.The method of Scientometrics was used to probe the comprehensive knowledge of marketing discipline. The marketing journals, the marketing researchers and the marketing knowledge were analyzed, results were showed by Visualizing Techniques, the whole status and the trend of researches were made out by the mapping of marketing Knowledge, it help to understand the outlook of the discipline and the direction of development could be better comprehended.The innovation was reflected in the research scopes, multi-angle of the study and new tools used. The main work involved four aspects:(1) looking at the comprehensive status of marketing disciplines from the vertical and horizontal viewing angles; (2) Evaluating marketing journals, authors and knowledge unit based on social network analysis (3) Validating the state of marketing discipline by different theoretical models (4) Analyzing the trends of domestic marketing academic research in three decades.The dissertation can be divided into three parts, the first part consists of three chapters, in addition to the introduction chapter, and two chapters were contributed on the history of marketing and the scientometric methods respectively. In chapter 2, the marketing history was briefly introduced, the development stages and perspective of marketing thought was mentioned, they would be compared with the final results to show what had changed, and would be the basis of the interpretation of final results. In chapter 3, the principles and methods of Scientometrics and Visualizing Techniques were introduced, the advantages and disadvantages of their application were also mentioned, those introductions would be necessary for the better understanding and accurate interpretation of the results.The second part is the focus of this dissertation, it also consists of three chapters, explored the overall development trend of marketing disciplines from marketing journal network, co-author network and knowledge network respectively. In chapter 4, the status of marketing discipline was tracked from marketing journals. Sixty-eight continuously published marketing journals were chose for the study, the network of marketing journals was constructed by the citation relations between journals, core journals would show off in the network, the citation relations between journals from different disciplines would tell the knowledge flow direction between disciplines, it could be a sign for the judging of maturity status of the marketing discipline. Results showed that, of the sixty-eight marketing journals,17 journals could be chose as the core journals, and marketing journals were most closely related to management journals, second was psychological journals and third was economic journals, several marketing journals can be seen as the flagship journals of the discipline of marketing, these journals include Journal of Marketing, Journal Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, and Marketing Science. It could be determined that the marketing discipline was already in a maturity status from the journals network relations. It also founded that marketing journals can be divided into five categories.The network of marketing journals can also be used as a ranking of journals by the indices of network centrality, in contrast with the traditional journal evaluation methods, it could be more objective and stable. Traditional journal ranking often compute by surveyed data, it was more easily influenced by many factors, such as organizations with different goals, agencies of different sizes, and the personal characteristics of interviewee, thus the results could be more subjective. Even a lot of marketing journals rankings had a certain consensus on the top marketing journals; it had more varied outside the recognized top ranking journals. Although simple ranking based on the comparison of the number of citations can be objective, but the results are prone to be manipulated, ranking based on the social networks of citation relations of journals can be objective and more stable.In chapter 5, the trends of the academic research development were tracked by research collaboration. Co-authorship of the three flagship journals of marketing disciplines was analyzed to show the Invisible College of marketing disciplines. The relations between research collaboration and research output, between research collaboration and output quality, were explored. The results showed that, cooperation between researchers is increasingly closer, more and more frequent, the scale of collaboration is also increasing. Whether or not cooperation was found to be significant correlation with the frequencies of cited, which was even more clear in the short-term, but the frequencies of cited which is often choose as the index of research quality was not found to be significantly affect by the number of author in cooperation. Four stages of co-author networks was showed that the marketing discipline is becoming more and more uniform and maturity, rather than gradually split recession, this is consistent with the conclusion made by citation analysis of marketing journals.Three levels of research collaboration in marketing academic were also analyzed. At the level of State, United States as the birthplace of marketing discipline was the first well-deserved, according to the evaluation of network centrality, Netherland’s influence in the marketing discipline was greater than that of Canada. China also had a good performance,. Germany, France, Britain were in the top list of marketing academic research performance too. At the level of institutions, the last decade of high-yield institution was the University of Pennsylvania; Duke University was in the second place, Northwestern University in third place. Established research base of marketing was the most influent player, but research-oriented universities and institutions located in developed areas also had competitive edges. At the level of individual author, the output of authors were less stable than that of institutions, the top list of researchers changed dramatically comparing the output of one decade with the output of three decades.In chapter 6, the research topics were analyzed to help comprehending in depth into the specific knowledge and the structure of the knowledge. Word frequency analysis was used to detect the marketing research hot topics, co-occurrence networks were constructed at three levels to reveal the marketing knowledge network. The results showed that, hot research topics in the marketing discipline were consumer behavior, brand management, relationship marketing, product management, service marketing, advertising and marketing strategies, the network of those hot topics as the core knowledge of marketing discipline composed an overall tight body of knowledge.High-frequency words were coded according to different discipline and different marketing specialization, and networks were formed to show the relationship between disciplines and specializations. At the discipline network, marketing mainly related with management, psychology, economics, finance, sociology and general business, management discipline was closest with marketing discipline, this was also show in the journals network. At the specialization network, the more compelling research areas were brand, product, and consumer behavior research, but according to network centrality indices, marketing strategy, service marketing and sales management were the more central areas. At the research direction network, new product, marketing strategies, services and customer relationships, brand extension research, market-oriented research was the more prominent direction research area. The research design of marketing was more focused on the interaction between variables, rather than model-based approach.The third part consists two chapters. In chapter 7, domestic marketing academic research was analyzed. Results showed that, although domestic research was subject to be impacted by the international research themes, some of the newly emerging research focuses were timely introduced into the domestic marketing academia, such as services marketing, international marketing, internal marketing, market positioning and other fields of research, the domestic marketing research had retained its own characteristics, the research focuses were more related with national context. Those results can be help to the planning of future domestic research.The final chapter summarized the major conclusions and results. Generally speaking, results from multiple angles could help to update the overall understanding of marketing academic and marketing discipline. Whether from the perspective of journals, co-author network or marketing knowledge framework, the results all indicated that the marketing discipline was in a mature stage of development, there was no division in the body of marketing knowledge. Marketing scholars had traditionally seen the disciplines of psychology and economics as the two most important sources of influence to marketing discipline, the study showed that management recently become the greatest related discipline of marketing. Finally, problems existed had been discussed, and the visions of both international and domestic marketing academia that deserved the researchers’ efforts had been provided.