Written by Marie Brand and Farhana Tabassum
As IJRM begins a new chapter, welcoming Koen Pauwels as the new editor-in-chief, with Sharon Ng, Eric Arnould, and Stefan Wuyts as his co-editors, it also closes another chapter and it’s time to say goodbye. Join us as we look back at the last 3 years and the team heading up the IJRM community: Martin Schreier, Renana Peres, David Schweidel, and Alina Sorescu.
Assembling the team Let’s rewind the clock to three years ago and look at how the team got started. Martin, as the editor-in-chief had his pick of bright and eager scholars to complete his team. Martin reflects on how he head-hunted each of the people who would join him in leading IJRM.
Martin: “We had a special issue together with Alina. I got to know her, and it was clear that she would be a wonderful person for strategy. David visited Vienna for a seminar. While having a beer at a beer garden on a hot June summer day, we were reflecting on what type of duties we would potentially have to take on. David said he was kind of interested in this editorial position. Renana already had one foot in the team. She had all the experiences from the journal side, and with her as another expert on the quantitative side, we had all the competencies covered.
I like the fact that we are all fairly young. As a team, we are open-minded.
You need to be an independent thinker, but it also helps that you are not so super senior. We don't mind taking the work into our hands and pushing things forward.”
Work and play
If they all go on vacation together (still a big item on the to-do list: a diving trip with Renana followed by a hiking trip to Martin’s home in the mountains is already in the works), then surprisingly, the four of them would meet face to face for the first time!
The “fab four” have spent countless hours together in ZOOM calls: David was often in his office backed by a big dragon he folded out of paper (a COVID-era project, which his wife didn't want in the house). Sometimes Renana would connect wearing diving equipment. Those were meetings where Renana was in her best mood. Martin’s background was his parents’ home in the Austrian mountains while Alina joined from her Texas A&M university office.
It’s time to say goodbye
As their time as editors has come to an end, the sentiment Martin, Renana, David, and Alina expressed almost in unison was gratitude.
Martin: “I can give this official compliment to the team right off the bat. There are many things about being part of the editorial team that you anticipate, but you underestimate the relentlessness. You also underestimate the positive side: the joy of hanging out with a team of people in the same boat. Working with the people is what gave me joy. This has brought us together as the IJRM team.”
But if you think that the team of four will be leaving IJRM behind with one laughing and one crying eye, you’re mistaken.
Alina: “It's been a privilege, really, but there's only so much that you can neglect on all other sides of your career. I look forward to focusing a little bit more on my research and getting back to the things that drew me into this field in the first place. We're happy. We served. But three years is enough, and now other people have to do it.”
Martin: “It's good to pass it on because it's such a time-consuming, high-paced activity that I think it's difficult to keep up the energy.”
Renana: “IJRM handles 15 or 20% of the papers submitted to top journals in the field. We are four people, and a considerable proportion of papers go through us. It's really important to have editorial teams change otherwise you are giving a lot of power to very few people. So now it's time for others to speak.”
Innovation, Speed, Diversity – A Bold Strategic Move
Over the three years as editors David, Martin, Alina, and Renana brought a lot of heart to the job. As they hand the torch to the next editorial team, they reflect on IJRM’s core tenets. The editor-in-chief puts a strong emphasis on relevance.
Martin: “Marketing as a discipline is changing. If you look at a typical process, it’s probably two years. My worst paper took five years to go from initial submission to publication. And if we continue to move at that pace, we're going to be irrelevant to practice. It’s like we are building something in flight. We don't know all the answers, but we're going to put a stake in the ground now and encourage people to take a look at it. We don't follow paper templates. We are here to listen, not to be dogmatic. If the paper is well articulated, we are happy to give it a shot.”
Renana: “Our mission was to be active. For example, the creator economy was something that the industry and practitioners talked about. But in research no one did, and we coined the term, we defined it as a research topic”.
Be the (kind) reviewer you want to see in the world
Apart from advocating for a speedy process to aid the dissemination of innovative topics, Alina talks about the importance of being kind.
Alina: “There will always be authors that are disappointed with the outcome of the review process. But I also hope that nobody walks away from the process thinking it was just incredibly unfair and flawed or just wrong. IJRM is a journal with a high rejection rate, so there will necessarily be papers that don’t make it. But I don't think it was ever capricious. If anything, I tried to err on the side of the authors.”
It’s a tightrope walk, David agrees and adds that there’s no such thing as the perfect paper, even if reviewers often want to push authors to be perfect.
David: “We don't want to put out work that isn't ready for prime time, but we don't want to hold back work when it has the potential to make an impact. We try to weigh potential issues against the importance of the paper. Hopefully, we come down more so on the side of the authors in those cases.”
While some might argue that there is a culture of “killing the authors” during the review process in marketing research, IJRM wants to change things for the better, championing kindness.
Renana: “When people were rude and wrote nasty reviews, they sent them back to the reviewers to rephrase. We were not the ones who started this process, but I think we made progress. You can reject a paper, and be very critical, but remember that there are people there. You can ruin someone's career, or someone's willingness to keep doing research. We wanted to be kind and supportive.”
A Spirit of Community
While it is nice to be recognized as one of the leading academic journals in marketing research, David emphasizes that as an applied discipline, getting the pulse of what is going on in practice is key.
David: “It's one thing to make sure that we put that good quality work out, but if nobody's paying attention to it from practice, you know, what's the point? How long does it take, a few minutes to craft a social media post? Anything we can do to get any attention is an incremental benefit.”
When it comes to reaching a wider audience, IJRM has two unique aces up its sleeve: The IJRM Newsletter and the podcast “Up Next with Gabriella Mirabelli”.
For the past two years, Renana has been the head of the newsletter and as an ordained Jewish rabbi, she says that at the heart of both these roles is community.
Renana: “Rabbis build communities, they build congregations. And I wanted to use the platform to create a community, to bring people together. It’s not only about reading each other's papers but creating something that shows the people behind the papers. I wanted people to know that their colleagues have families and to understand these processes because otherwise, we're very lonely in what we do. And it became something that people really wanted to be part of.”
Martin: “IJRM papers are regularly featured on episodes of Gabriella Mirabelli’s podcast “Up Next” and I'm very thankful to her. It's a win-win. In a way, it was she who stimulated our Creator Economy Initiative. She reached out to me asking me about how TikTok works and we quickly realized that we hardly know anything about it. She decides what she’s interested in, and it usually turns out that what she’s interested in are the most impactful papers.”
Picking your favorite paper is like picking your favorite child
Over three years, hundreds of papers have come across the four editors’ desks. We asked each of them to pick a favorite. Alina could not pick just one. Instead, she picked the whole Creator Economy special issue.
Alina: “I picked the last issue with the Creator Economy because I was just so involved with it.
I like this kind of paper format where you first listen to practitioners and then you write a little idea piece that incorporates that feedback. It's just so much more vivid than a paper that is presumably rooted in theory.
At least we see in these papers marketing theory as a reflection of practice. That was one of my favorite things. The papers brought in very clear practitioner messages, and to me that was fun.”
On the other hand, David has no difficulty in picking his favorite. His favorite paper is one of the earliest papers they started handling, on the use of emojis in language. But he says that the initial version was very rough. David reached out to Caleb Warren, one of the AEs, who does a lot of work in text analysis. They gave the authors a little bit more latitude than they typically would have gotten because the kernel of the idea was solid. It was within the last month or two that IJRM accepted the paper.
David: “It really spanned the time that I was working on the journal.
It wasn’t the fastest review process, but it did what it was supposed to: Make the paper better.
And isn’t it the editor's job to save good papers from the review process?”
Renana’s choice is a paper by Martin Spann and his doctoral student, Sophie Berghueser on blockchain and product uniqueness in a crypto context. The paper started as a presentation at a Columbia Business School conference. Renana listened to their presentation and invited the authors to talk to the IJRM team. So they came to her to find out what they should do before the paper was even ready to submit. Magic happened: another idea nurtured through to acceptance.
Renana: “We really curated it from the beginning to the end. In a way, it symbolizes what we wanted to do as editors: take some idea and give it the nurture and the environment to grow and to develop.”
For Martin, the best papers are those where he sees an opportunity to help authors unleash their potential. Those are the papers that make him feel like he can make a change. He is not a fan of adhering to the “regular paper template.”
Martin: “In a behavioral paper we are used to showing process, but why do we always have to show process? It might not even be part of the contribution. There was one paper along these lines about anthropomorphism and the appeal of anthropomorphism across cultures. It was the first investigation to actively compare consumers' responses to anthropomorphism across cultures. And the authors identified an interesting and robust cross-cultural moderation. If you read the paper now, you see that process demonstration is not the goal of the paper.”
Any last words?
David: “Thank you to Martin for giving me this opportunity. I really enjoyed it, I learned a lot, and I'm grateful for it. Thank you, it’s been a privilege and a great experience.”
Renana: “To Martin, Alina and David, it was a real pleasure. We did everything with good intentions. I want to address this to all the reviewers, the AEs, the authors, and Cecilia [Nalagon, managing editor].
Whatever we did, we did it with good intentions believing that we were doing the right thing.
And if we did anything that was hurtful, we are sorry for that.”
Alina: “If I had to leave a message for the new editorial team or reviewers in general: be kind. We made the best decisions possible with the information we had. Academia is not a field to go into if you need a lot of positive feedback. But I think there is a tendency for it to be nastier than it needs to be. If we can take things down a little bit, that would be for the better for all of us.”
Martin: “I'm incredibly thankful for this wonderful journey that we took together, as a team of four. As an editor, you can only do so much. You need the AEs, the reviewers, and the authors. You need the newsletter team. You need the podcast. You need so many people. And that's what I’m deeply thankful for. The reason it’s been a great journey is that there were so many people supporting this initiative, this movement, this community. And we hope that people will keep supporting it. We will continue being ambassadors for IJRM after we have passed on the editorship.”
This article was written by
Marie Brand
PhD Candidate in Marketing
WU Vienna
Farhana Tabassum
PhD in Marketing
BI Norwegian Business School
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