Murtha Wins Top Award From Journal of Marketing

LEXINGTON, Ky. (June 11, 2015) — Brian R. Murtha, assistant professor of marketing and E. Vernon and William Smith Faculty Fellow at the University of Kentucky's Gatton College of Business and Economics, was awarded the prestigious American Marketing Association’s Journal of Marketing's 2015 Harold H. Maynard Award June 8. This award honors “the article that makes the most significant contribution to marketing theory and thought within the calendar year.”

Murtha’s paper, “Marketing Doctrine: A Principles-Based Approach to Guiding Marketing Decision Making in Firms,” co-authored with Goutam Challagalla from Georgia Institute of Technology and Bernard Jaworski of Claremont Graduate University, was published in the July 2014 issue of the Journal of Marketing. It examines a relatively new marketing concept, “marketing doctrine,” that leading business firms are beginning to adopt.

According to the awards committee, out of what were four very strong finalists for the award, “this paper was the ‘best of the best.’” The paper topped finalists from leading university business colleges including Wharton (University of Pennsylvania), Temple, Texas A&M, the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

“We are very excited to see Dr. Murtha’s work recognized internationally by the top thinkers in his field, and we are very proud of him,” said David W. Blackwell, dean of UK’s Gatton College of Business and Economics. “This award speaks to the quality of the college’s faculty and the importance and relevance of their research to businesses in the Commonwealth and across the globe.”

“This is an incredible honor,” said Murtha. “We are very excited and grateful, to say the least!”

The paper demonstrates that leading edge firms such as Apple, Amgen, Cisco, and others, are developing marketing doctrine because its simple, experience-based “principles” provide consistent guidance to marketers across the firm. As firms grow and diversify, they begin to hire and/or acquire marketers with very different marketing training, experiences, and means for making marketing decisions. Consequently, firms are increasingly dealing with a “marketing inconsistency” problem.

Murtha and his co-authors show that marketing doctrine can help address this problem. “Marketing doctrine refers to a firm’s unique principles, distilled from its experiences, that provide firm-wide guidance on market-facing choices,” they write. By identifying these principles, the firm provides strategic marketing guidance to all its decision-makers, but allows them the flexibility to execute responsive solutions.

While not yet widespread, this “principle-based” approach has begun to emerge among leading marketing firms. Apple’s doctrine relies on seven principles focused on marketing issues, including “Focus on few products and models” and “Read things that are not yet on the page (i.e. discover unmet or unrecognized needs) and don’t be a slave to focus groups.” The company has been extremely successful in the marketplace, and numerous firms try to follow their model.

But as Murtha and his co-authors discovered, the key difference between marketing doctrine and other forms of organization, according to most of the executives they interviewed, is “the importance of developing firm-specific principles that uniquely reflect a firm’s strategy and context, rather than…simply emulating other firms or theory.” Murtha’s paper not only identifies and defines the “marketing doctrine” concept, it also demonstrates ways firms can develop their own doctrine, and presents a conceptual model of how these doctrines can be used in the business world.

Murtha received his Ph.D. in marketing from Georgia Tech in 2008, MBA from Georgia Tech in 2000, and B.S. in business administration from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1995. His research and teaching focuses on strategy, marketing management, and personal selling. He has published in the Journal of Marketing, Management Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and the Journal of Business Research.

MEDIA CONTACT: Kathy Johnson, 859-257-3155, kathy.johnson@uky.edu; Ann Mary Quarandillo, 859-257-0750, annmary.q@uky.edu.