Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

Hi,

I'm an academic in the Marketing Department at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland.

The way you parse your question suggests you are in North America, but the following still holds true.

Essentially, a good PhD topic requires two things. Firstly a specific area of marketing practice [e.g. brand building]. Secondly a specific subset of theory - your work will develop/test/compare models and theories from a specific portion of the marketing literature.

In addition to this topic you will also require a supervisor - essentially he/she will manage you through the project. You need to do some reading to find people who research in the areas you are interested in - most Uni webbies have a paragraph or two per academic.

If you have no online access to marketing academic journals, then a visit to your local university library will allow you to skim-read some previous work.

Regards,
Michael.

Hi Conniek,

I'm an honours student in marketing, doing a thesis.

I agree with juliet - you really have to have a passion for the topic which will help you push through the tons of journal articles you must absorb.

More importantly, what contribution are you trying to make in your PHD? Why are you doing/contribute with your PHD?

My mistake was not doing what I wanted and took up the interest of my supervisor. I was so lost in my literature review, trying to find a gap and asking why I am doing it. I was going in circles, mislead by misleading titles and abstracts. It was miserable when supervisors think I've not been doing work when I had been going round and round.

Well, all is good now after I got a foothold in my what I want to do and identidying the key literatures that I will build on. (As Michael suggested in the 2 items require)

That's just my experience, as what I'm working on now is focusing on IMPLEMENTATION. My supervisor has special interest in this area because it is under researched. Why? because (pardon my english) you can find a shitload of definitions for "strategy implementation" because everyone sees it in different perspective. We all know what implemention does, when defining it...it covers a huge area.

Why I do this? Implementation is one of the key challenges. They used to focus on strategy formulation, then the saying goes "its easy to dream than act". There are many aspects in implementation and now, I'm going into the behavioral aspects - specifically what behavioral pattern approaches a marketing function adopts when exposed to different environment and other variables.

Oh, implementation researches are HEAVILY qualitative, took me a loooooooooong time to drill down to a do-able quantitative research. So its easy to see, with that much qualitative rsearches on this topic- they are still trying figure out implementation.

Oh well, I wish you the best and you will be the Subject matter expert, so choose a topic you really like!

Good luck!
benny

"I am not trying to scare you or anything, but you can put years of work into your thesis and it might come down to one person's opinion of whether or not you will make it through to their country club. And believe me - they love their country club and they don't let just anyone in. Until recently they only just started letting women in."

I just started my honours and I learnt from my supervisor that in order to get acceptance into a journal, you have to tailor you thesis to conform with their standards of presentation. For instance, American and British journals have different standards and they appreciate different styles of writing.

Ego wise, I don't feel individual professors have that much ego. The pay for academic is not really that impressive but they enjoy gathering obeservations and making sense out of them to provide some clarity to real practioners out there. Generally, They are paid to think, explore and teach. If you enjoy it, go for it.

For me, I don't think I'm cut out for PhD, I'm just learning research skills and getting used to being confused all the time with bombardment of information. :)