Marketing Inscribed: A Corpus Linguistics Comparison of Academic and Practitioner Marketing Publications

Differences in intent perpetuate well-established gaps between academics and practitioners. Strategic determinations manifest distinctive positionings situated along the spectrums of theory/praxis and rigor/relevance. Comprised of elements of art and science, marketing is a domain uniquely situated for examining this gap. Such an understanding holds international relevance as business competition is increasingly global. Once inscribed, marketing publications lend themselves to scrutiny and provide a point for assessing discontinuities in content between scholars and professionals. Through an application of corpus linguistics approaches frequently used bigrams and themes emerged which illustrate significant gaps in content. Specifically, this research suggests that where both groups focus on marketing themes, practitioners focus on media, technology and temporal positioning, and academics focus on customer relations, economics and scientific rigor. Such an understanding assists those engaged in marketing to refine their search for information and potentially enhance their marketing efficacy.