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MKTG Philosophy on Scholarship

Department Guiding Principles

Excellence: In everything we do, we strive for excellence. We commit to encouraging, supporting, and rewarding excellence in scholarship and scholarly impact. We recognize that individuals who strive for excellence can do extraordinary things.

Scholarship: We commit to the pursuit of meaningful contributions to scholarship that advance marketing knowledge creation and dissemination. We view scholarship as including:

Scholarship of discovery, which contributes to the stock of marketing knowledge.

Scholarship of integration, which makes connections across disciplines and contexts and interprets findings to offer a comprehensive understanding of marketing problems.

Scholarship of teaching, in which marketing theory and practice come together to contribute the highest form of understanding.

Learning: Learning is the center of all our scholarship efforts. We commit to actively engage in continuous adaptation and innovation. We recognize that learning is required for growth and improvement.

Distinctive Signature: We commit to a distinctive signature for our scholarship. We commit to creating a unique positioning of our scholarship in the minds of our stakeholders.

Themes Defining Our Distinctive Signature

To guide our individual scholarly efforts and bolster the group's impact, the VCU Department of Marketing has identified a set of themes that define our distinctive signature. Themes are viewed from two perspectives - a theme of ideas (cf. knowledge) and themes of contexts (cf. knowing).

Theme of Ideas: Responsible Marketing: The theme of ideas represents elements of abstract and generalized frameworks, models and theories, around which we commit to develop programs of research and generate scholarly contributions.

We identify "Responsible Marketing" as a guiding theme of ideas for the VCU Marketing group and define it as follows:

Responsible Marketing is the study of value-adding market relationships and exchanges in their larger economic and social context.

Responsible marketing represents the core of our scholarly mission. It is an area around which we commit to making contributions that address the scholarship of discovery and integration. It does not imply that everything and anything we do must relate to this theme. Rather, the commitment is to make a long-term contribution to this theme, leaving each project to be guided by ideas that make most sense in getting it published in the most prestigious outlet.

Themes of Context: Health Care, Globalization, Technology: The themes of contexts represent arenas within which we commit to test, apply, examine, and explore our frameworks, models and theories, for the purpose of solving specific problems that matter.

We identify health-care, globalization, and technology as guiding themes of contexts for the VCU marketing group. The University and School have strengths and resources in these areas that can be exploited. In addition, each of these contexts offers emergent and interesting problems that provide fertile ground for high-impact scholarly contributions. Consider some illustrative questions:

How can marketing be applied to encourage health care organizations to effectively deliver high quality of care while employing productivity and cost control measures to ensure efficient operations?

How can we enhance the health literacy of consumers to motivate better decisions and greater engagement?

How can we foster development of open networks that asynchronously connect global partners for innovation and growth?

How can we develop globally interconnected customer response systems that are both effective and efficient?

How can we configure technology to facilitate customer co-production in service development and delivery?

How can technology facilitate knowledge creation and knowledge capture at customer contact points?

The themes of context are a bridge between the diversity in faculty interests to study specific, contextualized marketing problems and areas where the University/School has unique strengths and resources that can be exploited. It is expected that these themes will evolve with faculty interests, and will serve the core scholarly mission of the group. Thus, unlike the theme of ideas, the themes of context are emergent and expected to be closely aligned with the group's contributions to the scholarship of teaching.

By connecting the themes of ideas and contexts in our scholarship, we aim to develop a generative cycle that emboldens our scholarship and deepens our link to practice (see figure below).

Several VCU Department of Marketing faculty members are engaged in a variety of research projects that fit the broad confines of Responsible Marketing. These applications identify scholarly works and applications within identified contextual themes.

To learn about faculty research interests, click here.