By my calculation, I have sat through close to thirty presentations over the past two days at the Marketing Sciences INFORMS conference. Each of the seven 1 1/2 hour sessions has comprised 4 or 5 individual presentations. It is a bewildering amount of information to absorb – but the conference functions very effectively as a form of intellectual “speed dating,” allowing you to get a great overview of the body of research that is currently underway in any one of the 15 topic areas that the conference covers.
So, who did well in the dating stakes? The best received presentations seemed to share the following characteristics:
- Outline an interesting hypothesis that seems intuitively reasonable
- Create an elegant, but robust, way of testing the hypothesis
- Draw clear implications for how the resulting information can be used
A common factor among the presentations that were less well received was, curiously, not the absence of the second and third elements. It was the presumption that the importance of your topic was self-evident to your audience.
This reminded me of why the dialog between Marketing and Finance is often so difficult – it is because we make the mistake of assuming that the importance of marketing is self-evident. We need to be more adept at articulating the basic hypothesis for how marketing adds value to the business.
