This presentation was given by Andrew Stephen, University of Pittsburgh, at a pre-conference of the 2015 American Marketing Association Winter Marketing Educators Conference in San Antonio, TX.

1. BALANCING THEORY WITH
HOT TOPIC RELEVANT
RESEARCH
Andrew Stephen
University of Pittsburgh

3. What is a
“hot” topic?
Novelty – to
academics,
practitioners
Important,
relevant,
meaningful
Lots of open
questions
Lots of buzz
about it

4. 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

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

6. 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”

7. (sort of)

8. • 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

9. • 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

10. • 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

11. 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!

12. + THEORY
GREAT RESEARCH