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August 5-7, 2016
Atlanta, GA

Submission Deadline: February 7th, 2016

Overview of the Conference

Marketing is an applied academic discipline. Certainly, building and testing theory is essential. However, theory needs to be grounded in – and contribute to – the practice of marketing if it is to thrive. From this perspective, many academic conferences primarily consist of "talking to ourselves” about problems that are centered on the advancement of marketing literature. There are few opportunities to ground ourselves in the problems of practice, and contribute to solving those problems. The aim of this year’s summer ÂÜÀòÉç¹ÙÍø conference is to directly ground ourselves in practice. To that end, the summer conference will seek to: organize around real-world problems (vs. areas of the discipline or types of research); facilitate understanding of and interaction with senior executives; and, focus the discussion on the relevance of the research presented (as opposed to its theoretical and methodological details).

While this conference will include many of the traditional elements of Summer ÂÜÀòÉç¹ÙÍø conferences including competitive paper sessions, poster sessions, and special sessions, it will sharply depart from traditional organizing structure (e.g., competitive paper sessions organized by largely by literatures) and instead use “top concerns and problems of senior marketing executives” as our organizing structure. For the Summer 2016 conference we have identified six “Big Problems” of marketing practice. For each “Big Problem” area, we will have two special features of the program. The first will be six plenary sessions termed “senior marketing executive and senior scholar” jam sessions which will specify the nature of the problem, the challenge, and potential ways to address the challenge through research. These sessions will be in partnership with relevant SIGs. The second, will be a tight link to the competitive paper sessions that will follow from this plenary session. This will be evident as we review the program structure below.

Program

Unlike traditional programs that focus on different types/domains of research, this conference will be organized around six key problems that are "hot" for practitioners — and therefore fertile ground for doing relevant and impactful research:

1. Role of Marketing in the Firm and the C-Suite
2. The Digital Transformation of the Modern Corporation
3. Generating and Using Insight to Shape Marketing Practice
4. Dealing with an Omni-Channel World
5. Competing in Dynamic, Global Markets
6. Balancing Incremental and Radical Innovation.

Session Organization

Irrespective of which track (competitive papers, competitive special sessions, SIG special sessions), all presentations will be required to follow new presentation guidelines as below:

"All presentations are allowed only the following six slides (plus a title slide):"

1. What is the key problem/question you are examining?
2. Who/how many people care about the problem/question and why?
3. What is your "big picture" or "boxes and arrows" model?
4. What are your major findings (empirical papers) or top-line takeaways (conceptual papers)?
5. Who should do what differently as a result of your findings/suggestions?
6. What trade-offs or implementation issues is this most likely to involve?

Given these new presentation rules, it is expected that the time saving will be significant. All competitive paper sessions will therefore contain five papers, and all special sessions will be expected to have at least four presenters.

Full information is here:

/events-training/Conferences/Pages/Summer-Marketing-Educators-Conference.aspx

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