Evaluating Marketing and Trendy Topics from Marketing Managers' Perspective: Do the Work of Marketing Academicians 'Make Sense' to Marketing Managers?

This study aims to reveal how the new concepts and marketing practices, which have recently been trendy topics in the marketing literature, are perceived by the marketing managers as the target audience practitioners. The research is exploratory and adopts a phenomenological method. With purposeful sampling, data were obtained from 14 marketing managers through semi-structured in-depth interviews and analyzed with the grounded theory approach. Research findings show that marketing knowledge has two important effects on marketing managers: the interaction between academic knowledge and marketing practitioners and the interaction among marketing practitioners. Education - especially post-graduate education - is an important element that determines the direction of this interaction. While the practitioners with post-graduate degrees keep less distance with academic knowledge, the ones without post-graduate degrees use marketing with basic tools like price, promotion and underestimate knowledge. Having academic knowledge is seen as an important means of status and social discrimination in the relationship among marketing managers. As an original finding of the study, academic language is the tool that most clearly reveals this distinction. Although the distance between theory and practice is preserved despite the critical literature in this field, the individual requests of managers towards knowledge allow this gap to be diminished.