Marketing and cross-fertilization

Marketing has a long and deep-rooted tradition of multi- and cross-disciplinarity, both among practitioners and researchers. As a practice, since the early 1930s, marketing has been rooted in the transversality which characterizes the product manager, a pillar in the marketing function of most companies. This reflects the discipline’s inherent role of ‘interface coordination’ with other functions (production, R&D, sourcing, logistics, law, accounting, finance, etc.), something that has long been claimed in marketing definitions and the marketing concept itself. As a scientific discipline, marketing can be seen to have first emerged as a scope more than a science structured around a coherent set of theories and paradigms. The contrast is striking if one compares marketing with other management disciplines such as finance or accounting. Marketing, at its origin, is a science of markets, all of which are different and require specific paradigms (‘services’, ‘banking’, ‘BtoB’, ‘art’, ‘digital’, etc.). As a coordinator, marketing deals with a great variety of issues involving other functions. So, from the outset, marketing drew on other disciplines such as engineering, economics, sociology, psycho-sociology, ethnology, applied mathematics, philosophy, history and others. Some combined disciplines like sociology-ethnology-anthropology-marketing or economics-mathematics-marketing have generated structured and autonomous areas of research, with specific reviews, such as consumer behaviour or choice modelling. More recently, other hybrids have been developed, including marketing and medicine, marketing and neuroscience, marketing and robotics, marketing and nutrition, marketing and MIS, marketing and architecture, and marketing and history. Today, compared to its beginnings, even though marketing has become a much more structured discipline, this tradition of cross-fertilization can still be observed. This remains a strong feature of the discipline and of its dynamic, especially through the large number of multi-disciplinary experiences.

It is noteworthy that cross-fertilization with other disciplines and fields, although self-evident, has been the subject of very little research in academic marketing journals. In most cases, cross-fertilization is addressed from a specific perspective (sensorial marketing and cross-disciplinarity, communication and marketing, etc.) rather than as a systematic approach applied to the full breadth of the discipline. This is a difficult task, given that the boundaries of cross-fertilization are virtually limitless: ‘The discipline is an organizational category within scientific knowledge, where it establishes division and the specialization of work …’ (Morin, 2003). Addressing multi-disciplinarity brings into play the definition of disciplines, their proximity to one another and the often blurred boundaries that demarcate them; all of this is often a reflection of a particular history, that of the University and how it is divided into ‘disciplines’.

This Special Issue, while it does not provide a definitive response to this question, contains six articles that perfectly illustrate the propensity of marketing to develop in contact with other disciplines, or indeed to serve as a field for the application of other disciplines. Cross-fertilization is expressed here in different ways.

The first article, written by Chloe Guillot-Soulez, Sylvie Saint-Onge and Sébastien Soulez and entitled ‘Exploration des liens entre la communication de labels employeurs dans les annonces de recrutement, le mode de gouvernance et l’attractivité des organizations aux yeux des candidats’, is a wonderful example of intra-management, HR management and marketing multi-disciplinarity addressing the theme of employer labels. The authors show how the attractiveness of a brand extends beyond the market alone and how an employer’s attractiveness can be reinforced by the addition of a ‘Great place to work’ label. Here, the concept of brand equity is taken out of its usual marketing environment, extending one of the current decade’s strong trends to other functions.

The second article, by Tiphaine Chautard and Isabelle Collin-Lachaud, entitled ‘Introduction de la méthodologie d’analyse du storytelling en marketing: principes, apports et mise en œuvre’, picks up on the multi-disciplinarity involving the social sciences and organizational science in particular to introduce the storytelling method, a fine example of the ‘migratory’ concept.

The next two articles, both written by Alice Zoghaib, illustrate the potential of a multi-disciplinary approach involving sciences usually removed from management: acoustics and musicology. The first, entitled ‘Typology of advertising music components and consumers’ responses to the brand’, identifies, breaks down and characterizes the music used in advertising in respect of its technical characteristics (pitch, mode (minor/major), intensity, tempo, etc.) with a view to studying its impact on the consumer metrics used to evaluate advertising (perceptions, attitudes, intentions). In the second, entitled ‘Persuasion of voices: the effects of a speaker’s voice characteristics and gender on consumers’ responses’, following a multi-disciplinary study of the characteristics of the human voice and their consequences, the author manipulates these characteristics (pitch (high/low), timbre, softness, etc.) with a view to observing their impact on the persuasiveness of advertising.

The final two articles offer fine examples of the cross-disciplinarity of marketing, where the combination of several disciplines has given rise to standalone research fields. The article by Maud Dampérat, Florence Jeannot, Eline Jongmans and Alain Jolibert, entitled ‘Modeling a cocreative process: The contributions of design and management’, presents an application of design thinking through which engineering science combined with the customer focus of marketing are used to develop a highly effective approach to the development of new products. Finally, the article by Dominique Hanssens, entitled ‘The case for research on the marketing-finance interface’, sketches out the future of research in the field of ‘marketing accountability’ (marketing and finance). This is another wonderful example of a multi-disciplinary approach combining the metrics of marketing and finance, leading to the emergence of a literature and methods not previously found in either discipline (analysis of firm value is a perfect illustration of this).

We would like to thank all the authors who contributed to this Special Issue (20 in total), as well as those whose work was not accepted for publication, usually due to insufficient time for the finalization of their research. We also thank all of the anonymous reviewers, without whose help this Special Issue would not have been possible (see list below). We extend our thanks to the whole RAM team, including Anne-Sophie Pruvost-Zétina, Roselyne Lippolis and of course Nil Ozcaglar-Toulouse, the outgoing editor who suggested the challenge of putting together this Special Issue, and her successor David Gotteland. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the contribution of Dominique Hanssens, a Distinguished Research Professor of Marketing at UCLA Anderson School of Management, who was kind enough to respond favourably to our call for an article on marketing and finance, an area in which he is a pioneering author of international renown.