LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT – DECEMBER 2005

One of the great pleasures of serving EMAC as President is the opportunity to represent our academy internationally. This time next week I’ll be flying out of a cold, wet, wintry Birmingham into a bright, sunny Perth for the ANZMAC conference being held in Fremantle (5-7 December). ANZMAC is a little like a home-from-home with so many EMAC colleagues attending these days, and of course we have many members now based in Australia or New Zealand. Our second joint symposium (BIGMAC2) was held at the Milan conference in May and we are now planning for BIGMAC3 to be held as part of the next ANZMAC conference in Brisbane in December 2006. The theme will be ‘Broadening the Boundaries of Marketing’ and it will be led on the EMAC side by Kristian Möller, and for ANZMAC by Rod Brodie – book it in your diary now!

There are a number of important EMAC developments I want to update you on, more details of some of these will be found later in the Newsletter:

First, we have now agreed the venue for the 2008 conference. This will be held in Dublin, Ireland, and hosted by University College Dublin. Professor Mary Lambkin will be conference chair and the dates have been agreed as 18-23rd May 2008. This will offer a great opportunity to sample the delights of Ireland – the music, the food and, of course, the original Guinness – as well as attending to the serious academic business of the conference.

Second, we have now reviewed the workings of the Doctoral Colloquium at our annual conferences. A sub-group of EMAC Fellows, chaired by Berend Wierenga and including Gilles Laurent and Suzanne Beckmann produced a very helpful report and recommendations based on the operation of the colloquium over the last two years. Like good marketing professors they identified that the market for the colloquium is segmented and that at present we only really cater for one segment – students close to completion of their theses focusing on publications. A second segment that EMAC can and should support is those students in the earlier stages of their research who are seeking input, advice, constructive criticism before they embark on major fieldwork or data collection. Indeed, this was the target market for the DC until the recent re-focus on end stage students. As a consequence a further track has been added to the DC for Athens for which we will invite applications from early stage students.

As part of our process of building relations with other relevant academies and associations we have agreed to include a half-day joint symposium with ESOMAR at the Athens conference. The focus will be on “Measurement of Consumer Emotions”. Luk Warlop has kindly agreed to organise this for EMAC. There will be two or three invited papers from academics and two or three from practitioners. The aim is to identify ways in which we might work more closely together as academics and managers, to the benefit of both.

Our VP Conferences, Veronica Wong, has also been very active in discussing with other organisations managed through EIASM how we might share good practice more effectively. There will shortly be some proposals as to how we might share common conference platforms, achieve economies of scale in administration, and better exploit the combined networks we enjoy as European academies.
Further afield our VP Development, Gary Lilien, has been active in pursuing our links with ISMS. The Executive Committee has now decided that EMAC should become a co-sponsor of the annual ISMS Practice Prize, which is awarded annually for outstanding implementation of marketing science concepts and methods. Winning papers will be presented at the Marketing Science Conference and at the EMAC annual conference, video recorded to DVD and then made available for classroom use.

Gary has also been pursuing our links with the European Marketing Confederation (EMC) which is a confederation of professional marketing bodies across Europe. We are exploring ways in which we can facilitate networking between academics and practitioners.

Finally, I’m delighted to announce that the Executive Committee confirmed the nomination of three new EMAC Fellows. Professor Hubert Gatignon, editor of IJRM and longstanding member of EMAC has been made Fellow. Professors Piet Vanden Abeele and Lars Gunnar-Mattsson have been made Honorary Fellows. The Honorary Fellow category is for those colleagues who have provided outstanding service to EMAC in the past but are no longer active members. My congratulations to all three.

Now… I had better start packing my togs for Perth!

Best wishes