Marketing practitioners: The role of the academic journal?

The current environment in higher education drives faculty members towards research and publication. What the system values most is publication in refereed journals, preferably those which have achieved high reputation. But who benefits? Is it the academics who publish, the academics who draw upon the published work for their own research and teaching, students of marketing or those who practice marketing? This research differs in that it has sought to identify the extent to which academic research informs those engaged in marketing and in its practice. Of the two foci in the study the first relates to the literature. Here the work firstly identified journals in which marketing academics frequently publish. Secondly, based on the content of the journals a system for classifying the published papers was developed. The second focus examined the way in which marketing practitioners obtain information on recent developments. Clear evidence was obtained that academic marketing journals are neither read nor recognised by the great bulk of the sample. This would suggest that there is a large gap between the aspirations of those journals that purport to inform the practitioner and reality.