An Interview with Executive Director Ruth Bolton

In July, Ruth N. Bolton began her MSI appointment as Executive Director 2009-2011. In this role, she will oversee the quality and content of MSI-sponsored research, and will facilitate the matching of research interests between MSI’s corporate members and academics from some 200 universities around the world. She succeeds Russell S. Winer of New York University.

Most recently, Bolton was Professor of Marketing, W.P. Carey Chair in Marketing, at the W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University. There, her research focused on high technology services sold to business-to-business customers. She previously held academic positions at Vanderbilt University, University of Oklahoma, Harvard University, University of Maryland, University of Alberta, Carnegie-Mellon University, and University of British Columbia. She also spent eight years with Verizon.

Bolton’s earlier published research investigates how organizations’ service and pricing strategies influence customer satisfaction and loyalty, as well as company revenues and profits. She received her B.Com. with honors from Queen’s University at Kingston, and her M.Sc. and Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University. She served as editor of the Journal of Marketing from 2003 to 2005. With Leigh McAlister and Ross Rizley, she is the editor of Essential Readings in Marketing (2006), published by MSI.

MSI: What are your impressions of MSI after your first few months here?

RB: It’s a very busy time at MSI. The business landscape has shifted enormously, and there’s been a great acceleration in the tempo of marketing practice. The question is, How are we going to help companies stay out in front? All of us—practitioners and scholars alike—are questioning our assumptions and looking for enduring principles. As a field, marketing tends to have a romance with newness. In boom times, marketing managers could experiment with novel technologies and ways of doing business, and the outcomes were usually pretty good. But we don’t have that extra flex in the system any more. We have to be very smart and disciplined and careful about what we do.

What is MSI’s contribution to marketing practice in this environment?

MSI brings a focus on science and thought leadership that is both rigorous and relevant. There are many organizations offering events, executive education, customized research, data aggregation—you name it. What differentiates MSI is the scientific rigor that we bring to addressing business challenges. We are fact based. We try to anticipate and prepare for best practice five years from now.

Even if business conditions were stable, managers would not have the time and bandwidth to do long-range planning and contingency analysis to identify successful strategies for the future. That’s one reason why MSI trustees come to our conferences: to immerse themselves for a day and a half in thinking about those important issues, as opposed to the daily to-do list. Members appreciate that opportunity for reflection. I think all of us at MSI fundamentally believe that we’re nourishing and preparing our members for the future.

A perfect example is the Shopper Marketing Initiative. In June, a dozen member companies met with [CMO] Earl Taylor, [Executive Director] Russ Winer, and me to drill-down on questions about consumer shopping.

Today, consumers are moving in a dynamic environment in which there are multiple touch points with retailers and manufacturers and new media. They talk to friends and family—and to people all over the world via the Internet. This journey ultimately will end in a purchase decision, but that decision is complex—it might be impulsive or planned or some mixture of the two. How do you influence people in that environment? How do consumers manage their behavior and use information to meet their goals? How do their emotions operate as they seek consumption-related goals? What special research tools—whether it be ethnography or MRI scans—can we use to understand their behavior? These are frontier issues in consumer science.

To bring the best minds in academia to work on this, we’re planning a Shopper Marketing research proposal competition. In 2010, we will hold a conference to bring new knowledge on this topic to all our member companies. In the meantime, we are developing new methods of communicating our research insights to members as quickly as possible.

What is MSI’s contribution to academia in the current environment?

MSI has great brand equity in the marketplace in terms of our ability to identify research priorities and to make quality judgments about rigorous and relevant research. In the short run, we support research and conferences. Sometimes we infuse ideas into academic conferences or activities or incubate new projects or ideas. That has resulted in some path-breaking work; for example, the very early work on service quality, brand equity, market orientation, and financial metrics was supported by MSI.

We also have a long-run effect, because our research priorities are disseminated around the world. Government-run grant programs—such as those in Canada or China—use our research priorities in making their funding decisions. It is not uncommon for articles in leading marketing journals to reference MSI’s priorities. We have great influence and credibility in this area.

Can you talk about the current research priorities setting process?

The fundamental purpose of our research priorities is to identify the managerial challenges facing our member companies, and frame them as research questions in a sufficiently nuanced way so that they provide clear guidance to academic researchers.

For the 2010–2012 research priorities, we are conducting qualitative in-depth interviews with trustees from every member company. We will use the interview data to complement the input we gather in breakout groups, discussions, and trustee balloting.

We’re very enthusiastic about the thoughtful input we’re gathering in these interviews. Managers often begin by talking about their immediate concerns—innovation or brand/customer portfolio management, for example. But as we probe further, they start to articulate their fundamental underlying concerns. It’s fascinating to listen to trustees from diverse industries voice similar concerns and issues. We will identify those common themes and articulate them as a research agenda. Our goal in this “translation” process is to bridge the business and academic thought-worlds; this represents the core of MSI’s leadership role.

Are there other research initiatives or areas of special interest?

Growth is an important goal for almost all our member companies, and they are interested in innovation in its broadest sense: new or improved product and service offerings, business processes, and business models. More specifically, many of our member companies have shifted from a goods-centric to a service-centric perspective, and are deriving substantial revenue streams from value-added services. So, they are keenly interested in services as a strategy for profitable growth and competitive advantage.

Service innovation—for example, long-term solution-selling in high tech B2B—is very different from innovation in traditional manufactured goods. The integration, strategy development, and execution challenges of service innovation are enormous—for B2C as well as B2B companies.

Many firms are engaged in complex, collaborative co-creation processes with customers that are nothing like the NPD processes described in marketing textbooks! At the same time, companies are wrestling with organizational silos, learning challenges, and a rising tide of new media and information sources. Managers’ tool-kits are over-flowing with theoretical perspectives and research techniques. They must integrate traditional research data with clickstream data, ethnographic studies, and an increasing number of metrics, including social metrics. There’s so much we can do here to advance customer insights, models, and metrics.

We are asking our member companies to provide specific guidance so we can sharpen our focus on the most compelling questions about growth, innovation, customers, knowledge, etc.

Based on what we’ve heard from our member companies, we are systematically tackling other major issues in our upcoming conferences.

The November Trustees meeting will look at how companies can identify compelling value propositions—and then develop effective and efficient marketing strategies—under dynamic and turbulent conditions. We have a great speaker line-up!

Our March conference will focus on effective marketing spending. We will start with the basics: How do you recognize effective versus ineffective resource allocation? Do new communication technologies change the fundamentals? How do firms identify, create and maintain a healthy product, customer, or geographic-market portfolio? How can marketing strategy and analysis shape marketing spending so that firms grow profitably?

These are difficult, multi-faceted questions facing marketers today, and I’m confident that these conferences will shed some light—as well as offer practical insights—for participants.

Any final thoughts about MSI?

I’m continually amazed by the way that MSI works as a “knowledge network” that helps people pinpoint and address critical challenges facing their organization. I am reminded of Samuel Johnson’s observation, “Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” MSI provides the best of both types of knowledge. It connects people from around the world who have a deep understanding of marketing science and practice. It’s fascinating to be part of this knowledge network, and to see it operating on a daily basis.