Frontiers of marketing research

The course focuses on supporting students' development of lifelong abilities to summarise and synthesise research to identify, describe and reflect on the research frontier within a current research topic in business or consumer marketing. The main focus of the course is to guide students in identifying a research problem and producing literature reviews that contribute to both an academic and a practical understanding of contemporary phenomena relevant to marketing research and practice. The course content is divided into four parts, each grounded in distinct research-related foundations, which run throughout the entire course. The first part focuses on enabling the students to learn about philosophical perspectives on knowledge, theory building and research contributions within marketing, and how these can be used to evaluate research. The second part concerns learning about different types of literature reviews, conducting structured database searches and summarising, synthesising, organising and presenting the results of such reviews in an academic format. The third part centres on the students applying the knowledge acquired from the first two categories to identify a topic and design, carry out and write a structured or semi-structured literature review within either business or consumer marketing. The fourth part involves the students learning through presenting and discussing the results and implications of their reviews in a written report, which they present and defend in seminars, as well as performing as peer reviewers of the work of others. Instruction is primarily in the form of seminars, where the students interact, present and discuss literature, methods and their own work together with other students, under the guidance of a teacher. Other formats may also be included, such as lectures or workshops. Through the seminars and lectures, the focus is placed on how the course content can be used to contribute to both an academic and a practical understanding in various marketing research contexts.