Intern. J. of Research in Marketing 28 (2011) 75

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Intern. J. of Research in Marketing

j ourna l homepage: www.e lsev ie r.com/ locate / i j resmar

The inaugural EMAC Distinguished Marketing Scholar Award

In 2010, The European Marketing Academy inaugurated what is tobe an annual award, the EMAC Distinguished Marketing ScholarAward. The award is designed to be the highest honor that amarketing educator who has had extensive connections with EMACcan receive. The two main criteria for the award are: (1) outstandingmarketing scholarship as reflected in extensive and impactfulresearch contributions, and (2) outstanding contributions to theEuropean Marketing Academy. Other criteria of important but lesserweight are (3) teaching and mentoring, (4) general creativity/innovativeness, and (5) service to the marketing community andthe public at large.

I served as chair of the selection committee, whose members wereGilles Laurent of HEC and Don Lehmann of Columbia. We reviewed anumber of very impressive nominations and struggled to come upwith THE Inaugural Awardee. It turned out to be an impossible task. Toresolve that challenge, the committee chose, for this year and for thisyear only, to make the award to TWO extremely deserving scholars:Peter Leeflang of the University of Groningen and BerendWierenga ofErasmus University Rotterdam. Their stellar careers and accomplish-ments are documented at http://www.emac-online.org/userfiles/file/EMAC%20Chronicle_no8_2010.pdf.

The award was made at the EMAC Annual Conference inCopenhagen on June 4, 2010. In addition, Peter and Berend eachpresented a paper at a special session in their honor that day. Anotherelement of the award involved an invitation to write a scientific articlefor IJRM; those articles follow. The papers went through a formalreview process with Don and Gilles serving as referees and the regularIJRM editor (Marnik Dekimpe) and myself (as chairman of theselection committee) acting as co-editors.

Peter's paper calls for the development of what he refers to as“Distinguished Marketing,” a future, aspirational state for marketing.He envisions distinguishedmarketing being developedwithin firms inwhich marketing and its related research methodologies are formallylinked, and inwhichmarketing influences and coordinates all relevantfirm functions that create customer value. The related decisionmaking should employ what he calls “useful decision tools”, and bebased on knowledge and facts. He structures his paper around theorganization, orientation, organization, and operationalization of themarketing function, and argues that distinguished marketing is

doi:10.1016/j.ijresmar.2011.05.001

necessary for the professional growth of marketing and for it toachieve its true potential in practice. He separates distinguishedmarketing from the forms of marketing normally seen in practice, andprovides challenges for academics and practitioners alike to worktogether to achieve this potential. A provocative and challengingarticle indeed.

Berend's paper, while on the surface quite different from Peter's, ison a closely related topic—the need for research on managerialdecision making in marketing. Berend argues that there are sufficientdifferences between marketing decision making and other functionaldecisions to make the field appropriate for study by marketingacademics. Those academics are, he claims, currently focused toomuch on either descriptions of marketing phenomena or onoptimization with little consideration for the humans involved. Hecites work in behavioral decisionmaking, dual processmodels and theroles of learning, emotions and expertise in decision making. Inaddition, he discusses the potential of brain imaging studies,unobtrusive measurement methodologies and behavioral laboratoriesto provide the data needed to support the very rich research agendathat he develops.

Both of these scholars provide carefully reasoned and passionatecalls for a change of emphasis and direction—for (at least some)marketing academics, i.e., to focus their research on domains that relateto the betterment of the marketing profession, improvement of themarketing function, and alignment ofmarketing theory withmarketingpractice. In line with the DistinguishedMarketing Scholar Award, therecould be no greater tribute to these outstanding scholars than to have anumber of us take up their research challenges. Perhaps we will findsuch research published in IJRM in the not so distant future.

Gary L. LilienChairperson, EMAC Distinguished Marketing Scholar Selection

Committee, 2010Pennsylvania State University, Smeal College of Business, USA

E-mail address: Glilien@psu.edu