Marketing research centers: community, productivity, and relevance

Abstract

Business schools, especially in their marketing departments, increasingly feature diverse forms of research centers. That is, marketing departments have long organized centers focused on personal selling or retailing, with the primary goal of placing undergraduate students into sales or retail positions (i.e., some of the most popular job categories for undergraduate marketing students). But more recent iterations of these centers have evolved, creating notable platforms for generating high quality research (e.g., Sales Excellence Institute at the University of Houston)Footnote1and establishing communities of researchers (in this issue, see Ahearne2017).