Market-shaping phases—a qualitative meta-analysis and conceptual framework

This study explores the potential existence of reoccurring patterns in market-shaping processes by employing a qualitative meta-analysis to analyze 79 case studies on market-shaping. Through the evidence-based synthesis of qualitative data, we extract 20 generalized market-shaping activities that inform and form the foundation of a three-phased market-shaping process. This conceptual framework divides the market-shaping process into the phases of infusion, formation and retention. By applying our conceptual framework to the qualitative dataset, we explore the presence of market-shaping phases and provide further insights into the interdependences and dynamics between multiple, simultaneously occurring, market-shaping processes. By providing a structured market-shaping process, we attempt to reduce the overall complexity of the market-shaping phenomenon and facilitate the operationalization of the phenomenon for further market-shaping research. Additionally, our conceptualization provides practitioners with a framework to analyze the market-shaping efforts of other market actors and support the design of their own market-shaping strategies.

Assessing and enhancing the impact potential of marketing articles

Although the impact of marketing is a recognized priority, current academic practices do not fully support this goal. A research manuscript’s likely influence is difficult to evaluate prior to publication, and audiences differ in their understandings of what “impact” means. This article develops a set of criteria for assessing and enhancing a publication’s impact potential. An article is argued to have greater influence if it changes many stakeholders’ understandings or behaviors on a relevant matter; and makes its message accessible by offering simple and clear findings and translating them into actionable implications. These drivers are operationalized as a checklist of criteria for authors, reviewers, and research supervisors who wish to evaluate and enhance a manuscript’s potential impact. This article invites scholars to further develop and promote these criteria and to participate in establishing impact evaluation as an institutionalized practice within marketing academia.

Markets, infrastructures and infrastructuring markets

Despite a growing understanding of market infrastructures—the rules and socio-material arrangements that enable agreements on the properties of goods, and the calculation of value, equivalence and exchange—we know little of what lies beneath the arrangements that underpin and are implicated in exchange. The socio-material lens has done much to explain how specific assemblages circulate information and goods, but has done little to explain how different infrastructures configure relations between dispersed market practices. Using the history of the development of the market for market research we show how knowledge-based infrastructures constitute markets as knowledge objects: new expertise emerged through alliances between academia, government, and private actors form a new occupation embodied in specialist agencies that set themselves up in an infrastructural relation to marketing practices. Our conceptualization of markets as knowledge objects extends extant understandings of markets by showing how: (1) extant knowledge-based infrastructures are drawn on to construct new markets; (2) infrastructural relations emerge between different markets to constitute multiple systems of provision and demand, leading to an increasingly valuable knowledge infrastructure; and (3) organized practices in one market are often heavily reliant on connections to other markets, including knowledge-based infrastructures such as market research services.