Terry Clark

Where/How Does Marketing Fit? What Is Marketing’s Place in the Firm and Within the Family of Business Disciplines?

In the early 1980s, the Academy of Management Review commissioned a set of articles to assess the contributions of various business disciplines to strategic management. These assessments included evaluations of contributions from industrial organization (Porter 1981), administrative behavior (Jemison 1981), and marketing (Biggadike 1981). Biggadike’s conclusions, judged marketing to be theoretically thin, giving him little hope for change in the future.

Marketing’s Theoretical and Conceptual Value Proposition: An Abstract

“…the marketing discipline faces an urgent need for a rethinking of its fundamental purpose, premises, and implicit models that have defined marketing for at least the past 50 years” (Webster & Lusch p. 389, 2013).

Country Market Sequential Order-of-Entry: A Learning Effects Approach

ABSTRACT In this article, we identify and describe the sequential order-of-entry problem. The sequential order-of-entry problem arises when, after having identified a desirable set of country markets to enter, firms are unable (because of budgetary constraints), or unwilling (because of possible learning or strategic issues), to enter all at once. The question then arises whether some sequences to entering the desirable set of country markets are better than others? Answering this question is shown to be nontrivial. The article outlines a number of arguments for the existence of superior sequences to entering a set of desirable country markets, and develops normative and dynamic frameworks to aid in the identification and evaluation of sequences.

Book Reviews Featuring a Special Essay by Roger A. Kerin

Some years ago, I had the pleasure of teaching an undergraduate marketing principles class in a 500-seat auditorium at the University of Texas at Austin. Toward the end of the semester, a student in the class came to my office and politely inquired, “Are you Professor Kerin?” “Yes, come in,” I replied. An astonished look covered the student’s face as he exclaimed, “You look so different up close!” I tactfully ignored the remark but wondered what he expected to see in a close encounter. The same thought surfaced when Terry Clark asked me to write an essay that described the “personal and idiosyncratic aspects of my research, my research process, as well as the story of my formation and development as a scholar.” However, I came to view Terry’s invitation as an occasion to recall events and experiences, to recognize influential people and perspectives, and to acknowledge the role that choice and chance have played in shaping my academic career and my diverse scholarly pursuits. I also viewed his invitation as an opportunity to reflect on the origin and context of some of my published work and the context in which it was written. In doing this, I touch on my research orientation and highlight how my teaching interests and research endeavors have reinforced each other over the past two decades.