Friends With Benefits: Practitioner Publishing as a Pathway to Collaboration in Social Marketing

Four years ago, the late Dr. Susan Kirby wrote an editorial for Social Marketing Quarterly (SMQ) entitled “Social Marketing Practitioners: Should you share your work in SMQ?” (Kirby, 2019). Spoiler alert—the answer was a resounding “yes,” as she noted her focus in becoming associate editor for the journal was “to advocate for practitioners, their viewpoints, their needs, and ways to engage them more fully in the journal” (p. 179). Upon her passing soon after the piece was published, Susan’s friends and colleagues described her devotion to social marketing and her passion for supporting practitioners (Jordan et al., 2020). In her editorial, Susan emphasized that throughout her career, her goal had been to “engage practitioners in using better and more science and research in their social marketing practice” (p. 179). She linked practitioner publishing to this goal, essentially pointing out that if practitioners don’t publish their work, how will others be able to conduct effective formative literature research and avoid reinventing the wheel? She went on to detail how she and SMQ planned to encourage practitioners to publish, including surveys to readers of SMQ to find out the needs of practitioners, a mentoring webinar, shortened review timeframes for article submissions, and developing a co-creation model to bring academics and practitioners together.

Some of these actions have happened (such as the readership survey and webinar), and some are still in the works with the current editorial team committed to carrying on Susan’s work (McDivitt, 2020).

Why do we think the work Susan started is so important? Practitioners publishing in journals like SMQ play an important part in bringing the academic world and practitioners closer together, or “closing the academic/practitioner gap” as many have called it (Gray et al., 2011; Tapp, 2004; Tucker & Lowe, 2014; to name but a few). From a literature review that we’ve conducted, the conversation appears to be somewhat missing in social marketing circles.

So what is the academic/practitioner gap? It’s been defined as a “large gap between science and practice” and has gone under the various guises of the science/practice gap, academic/practitioner divide, theory/practice gap, or theory/practice divide (Alpert et al., 2022), and is large enough to be described as being “worlds apart” (Tucker & Lowe, 2014).

Is it a conversation being avoided and does it need addressing while social marketing is still in its infancy (remembering social marketing was only celebrating 50 years in 2022)? It’s not too late to have this discussion, stop the gap from growing any further, and ensure both parties are as close as they can be to fulfilling the discipline’s goal of addressing social issues.

The literature on academic/practitioner gaps within marketing and adjacent disciplines points to a set of common causes, with a lack of knowledge-sharing clearly being the most important (Alpert et al., 2022; Baines et al., 2009; Burton, et al., 2017; Crosier, 2004; McKenzie et al., 2002). In essence academics and practitioners do not engage with each other’s work—this means practitioners not publishing in or reading marketing journals. In fact most in practice do not even know the names of marketing journals (McKenzie et al., 2002), and the irony is not lost on us writing this piece for a journal (albeit one that at least has a view to engage practice and encourage practitioners’ contribution). This results in academics not learning from work and programs in the field, and on the other hand relevant theory and research not influencing practitioners and marketing experts in their delivery of programs. While many point the finger at academics, given the nature of academic journals looking inward, we believe responsibility sits across both sides of the divide.

Our own Experiences with Practitioner Publishing (or not)

Between us we have over 40 years’ experience working as practitioners, Liz in marine conservation and Phill in marketing (both across commercial and then social marketing). We have different experiences in publishing as practitioners, with Liz not having published in peer-reviewed journals, while Phill has seen three articles published in both journals and academic books (Sherring, 2019, 2021a, 2021b); all are case studies of social marketing programs, including one in SMQ.

As practitioners, both of us have shared experiences struggling for capacity and finding the motivation to publish in journals. Phill’s reasoning for publishing was to publicise work from the Aotearoa New Zealand community but more important he hoped to lead by example for other New Zealand practitioners (who he believes are as good as any other in the world) to publish in journals, add their work to the social marketing literature and then have a louder voice at international conferences such as the International Social Marketing Conference and the World Social Marketing Conference.

Practitioners “often have little time and encouragement to develop journal articles” (Posner, 2009: p. 21), and this was the case for Phill, who is in wholehearted agreement with Susan’s comment that for practitioners, “writing manuscripts and the submission process is time-consuming, not part of their job description, and possibly daunting for some” (p. 180). This is also backed up in SMQ reader survey results. Phill researched and wrote his articles outside of work hours, without access to many journals and academic papers, having to rely on the generosity of the few academics he knew to source articles for him.

While making him feel like a slight outlier in the practitioner space, Phill’s first-hand experience publishing and adding to the social marketing literature has benefitted him in a number of ways. Once published, he has gone on to develop close relationships with many in the social marketing academic space, speak at international social marketing conferences, serve as an Executive in Residence at Social Marketing @ Griffith (part of Griffith University in Brisbane), and is now Co-Chair of the New Zealand Social Marketing Network (which caters to practitioners and academics alike). This is why Phill (along with Liz) sees the advantages of practitioners publishing and how it can contribute to the closing of the gap.

During her time as a practitioner Liz did not publish a single journal article, though she would have happily teamed up to co-author papers with the academics whose work she supported as a boundary organization if any of them had ever approached her (and especially if they had offered to handle the statistics!). Other than the fact that publishing was neither required nor expected in her professional role, Liz cites the demands of hitting grant deliverables and keeping up with project reports as her main reason for not publishing.

Today it’s a different story, after returning to grad school mid-career to study social marketing and earn a PhD. She is now situated within a university setting where publishing is the norm. Given her background, Liz considers herself a “pracademic,” a term she encountered multiple times while conducting her PhD research. She found that many social marketing professionals identified in this way—due to having expertise from both academic and practitioner realms and working within both settings.

With Liz’s dissertation research focused on the discipline of social marketing itself and its institutionalization (Foote, 2022), this topic gave her the opportunity to interview many individuals (academics, practitioners, and pracademics alike) and ask broad questions about their perceptions regarding the challenges faced by the discipline. Specifically, she wanted to identify potential barriers that could hinder the further advancement of the discipline and prevent social marketing from becoming part of the organizational culture in any given professional setting. One of the resulting themes she described was “complicated academic/practitioner dynamics” (p. 140); many participants referenced an academic/practitioner disconnect, with one even going so far as to call it a “chasm” (p. 154). Many referenced challenges surrounding the use of theory, which is closely tied to the academic/practitioner gap. Others, however, noted the presence of pracademics and boundary spanners as indicating this gap is not so bad everywhere in the field. Participants went on to suggest solutions to institutionalization challenges; of the many ideas put forward, Liz identified seven broad categories, one of which was “bridging the academic/practitioner divide and increasing collaboration” (p. 173).

The Path Forward

It is clear to us—based on our collective experience, observations, and the research we have conducted—that the disconnect between academics and practitioners is problematic and that the discipline would benefit from more active and visible efforts to foster academic/practitioner collaboration. For the purposes of this Commentary, we will focus on the issue of practitioner publishing, and aim to amplify Susan’s views while providing additional insight and suggesting a path forward.

We argue that many practitioners are probably aware of the benefits of publishing their work (e.g., demonstrating leadership, increasing the visibility of their work, gaining credibility, and having the opportunity to be critiqued); Phill’s experience certainly bears this out. However, the fact that so few practitioners are managing to publish in journals suggests that the barriers to publishing are too high and the realities surrounding the practitioner context are simply not conducive to publishing for most. Indeed, despite its commitment to practitioner publishing, Social Marketing Quarterly has seen a drop in submissions by practitioners in recent years.

However, there is hope that practitioners haven’t been put off completely. The survey carried out by SMQ in 2019 (as mentioned in Susan’s original actions) indicates that much of SMQ’s readership is indeed practitioners. Case studies are deemed by readers to be the second most useful section of the journal to their jobs (behind research articles) and 31% want to see more peer-reviewed case studies published (the most of any section in the journal). Further, nearly half of SMQ’s editorial board is composed of practitioners (Deshpande et al., 2022), making SMQ a very practitioner-friendly journal.

Therefore, new and different approaches are clearly needed. How do we overcome the fact that practitioners typically don’t see enough value to their careers to justify publishing in journals? Can meaningful incentives be identified? What systems or structures can be created to support practitioner publication? For starters, in the SMQ survey nearly a quarter of respondents said they would be very likely to use additional resources to learn about the value of publishing and how to get started.

Can we look elsewhere for examples? One solution we would like to see developed further is a model that Susan identified from the business management field, specifically within the Network for Business Sustainability, where researchers and practitioners work together to make research more applicable and develop tools and resources to support co-creation of resources and publications (Sharma & Fischhoff, 2017).

What might a similar co-creation model for practitioner publishing look like in social marketing, that would benefit both academics and practitioners? We recognize the very different incentives and rewards systems that each group operates under, so we’d advocate for an approach that works within and leverages existing frameworks. For example, acknowledging the critical importance of publishing as a career requirement and form of currency in academia, could academics be enlisted to review practitioners’ completed project reports and work with practitioners to reformat and submit them as either case study or research articles? This could not only serve to earn the academic another publication for their CV, but would give them access to on-the-ground examples from practice in near real-time, helping them to align their own work with the needs of society and identify future research questions. Moreover, such an initial win-win arrangement could evolve into collaborations from the outset of future project planning and development. While collaborating on projects from the initiation stage (i.e., proposal development) is the ideal, we suggest that our proposed model of academics teaming up with practitioners to help them publish their completed work will lead to the type of relationships and reflexivity from both sides that will create enduring partnerships.

This type of partnership with practitioners could be considered a means of ensuring and demonstrating that one’s work has societal value, which is becoming increasingly relevant in academia (Conduit et al., 2022; Lindgreen et al., 2021). Indeed, marketing scholars have long argued that research should be focused on delivering outputs that have a wider value in society (Baines et al., 2009; Brennan, 2004). This approach could directly facilitate theory-to-practice as it would create a means for academics to engage with practitioner work and identify opportunities to apply appropriate theory while also providing a basis for ground-truthing empirical models through a more practical lens. In return, once engaged, practitioners could provide academics with practice-to-theory insights that serve as valuable data.

Others in the adjacent field of academic marketing have suggested that embracing intermediaries (i.e., consultancies and market research firms) is critical to bridging the academic/practitioner divide, proposing that “academics should work more closely with, co-author with and publicise the successes of intermediaries for mutual gain, and academics should be the first movers” (Lilien, 2010, p. 176). We believe that social marketing pracademics could serve as the ideal intermediaries in a co-creation and/or publishing model. These individuals can be found in industry settings, consultancy firms, as well as government agencies, with many having started out in academia. Pracademics would come to the table with a pre-existing understanding of the realities within both settings, and they would arguably be the best group to work with to pilot test a mutually beneficial co-creation model, beginning with publishing.

Whichever strategy is undertaken, whether it’s co-creation broadly, prioritising working with pracademics, teaming up to turn project reports into papers, or a mix and match approach (which we like to call “magpie-ing”), academics seeking to work with practitioners and help them publish their research need to communicate with them in the channels they inhabit. Solely tucking away as a Commentary in an academic-oriented journal (which we know practitioners aren’t prioritising to read) will not encourage practitioners to consider contributing their work, time, and collaboration. We’d suggest communicating this opportunity more visibly via national and regional social marketing associations (African Social Marketing Association, Australian Association of Social Marketing, European Social Marketing Association, Italian Social Marketing Association, Japan's Doshida Social Marketing Research Centre, Latin America Social Marketing Association, New Zealand Social Marketing Network, Pacific Northwest Social Marketing Association, Social Marketing Association of North America) and possibly larger generalised marketing networks such as the American Marketing Association and Australian Marketing Institute. Alongside the associations, promotion can occur through more commercial marketing publications, getting the message to marketing conferences that have a practitioner focus, and finally through social media. Alongside the associations, promotion can occur through more commercial marketing publications, getting the message to marketing conferences that have a practitioner focus, and finally through social media (through a range of channels belonging to either the publications, the authors and their institutions or agencies, and via social marketing interest groups - such as the SMQ LinkedIn group).

What’s in it for Both Parties?

So what is there to gain for practitioners to publish their work, or even better co-create programs with academics? As Susan rightfully pointed out in her original editorial, there is the opportunity for practitioners to learn from other practitioners' work. By publishing, practitioners are building a literature base of successful, or arguably even more important, unsuccessful programs (Akbar et al., 2021; Cook et al., 2020, 2021). This also gives them access to a list of practitioners they can communicate directly with and learn from practitioner to practitioner.

Not only does the peer-reviewed literature give practitioners a stable and long-term record of case studies to learn from, but it creates curricular material for academics to use for teaching. Phill from his own experience has had professors from various countries use his work as teaching examples, has guest lectured at Victoria University (his local university in Wellington), and one of his programs now features in a commonly used marketing textbook throughout Australasia (Elliott et al., 2021).

Academics as we’ve noted gain a new source of subjects and programs to publish about through a co-creation model, helping them chase increased relevance by boosting their all-important publication metrics. There’s also the potential access to more field-based research opportunities and programs to be involved with, especially in the formative stages—so theory directly influences practice and vice-versa (as mentioned before, helping achieve that societal value universities should be working towards). Thinking more broadly, this opens up the opportunity to build more meaningful relationships with practice (acting as the Trojan horse to close the gap). This could result in real-life case studies for universities to teach, a bank of guest speakers for lectures, and a mechanism to identify and facilitate opportunities for students to intern at practitioner firms or agencies.

Conclusion and Next Steps

We feel strongly that more collaboration between academics and practitioners needs to occur. We also acknowledge that while there are some great examples out there of existing collaboration, they are typically activities occurring behind the scenes that are not shared widely, and we suggest this also needs to change. Academics are increasingly seeking ways to make their work more relevant. Given that in the social marketing space practitioners often fall into roles within community not-for-profit groups or local and national government marketing teams, then any sharing between the two parties can only be a good thing, delivering better outcomes for society and the environment.

By contributing this Commentary, we hope to spur dialog within the field and more critically examine the academic/practitioner gap. We have based these recommendations upon our own experiences, observations, research, and through consultation with colleagues. Both of us have seen how bridging this gap can benefit those on either side. And we know there are other practitioner bright spots out there who have been able to successfully publish their work despite all the barriers; see (Deshpande et al., 2015; Palmedo et al., 2022) for examples of collaborations that resulted in publication within SMQ.

Since social marketing is such a relatively new discipline, there is still plenty of time to bring academics and practitioners together for a common goal. As both experienced practitioners and Liz now also an early career researcher, we are committed to this issue and would like to embed this objective of facilitating practitioner publishing into a broader research agenda focussed upon fostering academic/practitioner collaboration while amplifying the many inspiring (yet oftentimes hidden) examples that exist in our field.

We have our own opinions and beliefs as to how to overcome the barriers (while acknowledging they are numerous, pervasive, and riddled with pitfalls), but as social marketers we know that opinions and beliefs are insufficient. As Susan so aptly pointed out in her editorial, “we all know the key to any good program is audience research” (p. 179). Thus, we hope that others in the social marketing community will join us to help outline a more robust research agenda, engage in some conceptual thinking, and actively trial and evaluate some of these (and more) ideas.