Journal of Marketing | 2019
JM as a Marketplace of Ideas
Abstract
We are excited and honored to assume leadership of the Journal of Marketing (JM). Through its 83-year history, JM has played an important role in our discipline. We are grateful to the prior editors, V. Kumar, Vikas Mittal, and Neil Morgan, for their dedicated service in leading the journal. Before we share our philosophy and upcoming initiatives, we thought it would be worthwhile to step back and consider the role of journals in general and that of JM in particular. Journals are, at their core, an artifact—a digital or paper repository of ideas, findings, and implications. However, we believe this view limits our appreciation of the important role of journals. Journals are also reflections of the community that produces and uses them. In the words of former JM editor, Dave Stewart (1999, p. 1), “Placed in a larger perspective, a journal is the tangible manifestation of an intellectual community.” At their best, journals are bustling marketplaces of ideas that offer insight, challenge, debate, innovation, impact, and solutions. “Sellers” are authors and “buyers” are other authors, educators, managers, policy makers, consumers, and other societal stakeholders. “Commerce” is driven by values and principles that develop the “product”—ideas. At its worst, the marketplace narrows, and the people, methods, and, ultimately, the ideas become restricted to limited taste regimes. At its best, the marketplace is broad and deep—flush with a wide assortment of ideas across a range of topics and methods from authors around the world. As we step into our role as editors, we have set our sights on a JM that is a vibrant marketplace of ideas. We envision a JM that is not merely a repository of well-honed studies, but a platform for people, processes, and aspirations that shape the discipline in important ways. We see JM as the “market maker” of the field’s biggest and most robust marketplace of ideas, ensuring that interesting and important marketing knowledge is developed, disseminated, and used by members globally. In the spirit of this view, we have created the following mission statement for JM: The Journal of Marketing develops and disseminates knowledge about real-world marketing questions useful to scholars, educators, managers, policy makers, consumers, and other societal stakeholders around the world.