Another Reason Academics and Practitioners Should Communicate More

Abstract

Bronnenberg, Dhar, and Dubé (2007) show that there is a large geographic variation in market shares and perceived quality levels of a large sample of “national” and “regional” brands across many consumer packaged good categories, and they demonstrate that their geographic findings are new to academics. In this comment, the author shows that practice has been ahead of academics in this basic understanding. He then shows how a point of real leverage is to allocate marketing resources geographically on the basis of market response. There seems to be as much or more variation in market response to resources such as advertising and promotion as there is in market shares. This comment concludes with a plea for more interaction between academics and practitioners.