With three faculty serving as co-editors of leading marketing journals, Smeal will enjoy unparalleled impact on the discipline.
The 2024-25 academic year marks an important milestone for the Penn State Smeal College of Business Department of Marketing: three professors serve as coeditors of three different premier academic journals in marketing. There are only a handful of premier journals in the field, with a limited number of coeditors at each. A marketing department stands out from the crowd when it counts a coeditor among its research faculty; it is very exceptional to include three.
Karen P. Winterich (Gerald I. Susman Professor in Sustainability) will serve as coeditor of the Journal of Marketing Research (JMR). Margaret “Meg” G. Meloy (David H. McKinley Professor of Business Administration) will serve as coeditor of the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR). Stefan Wuyts (Calvin E. and Pamela T. Zimmerman University Endowed Fellow) serves as coeditor of the International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM).
JMR and IJRM are flagship journals of the American Marketing Association and the European Marketing Academy, respectively, publishing marketing research across the entire spectrum of the field. JCR is the No. 1 marketing journal focused on consumer behavior and the conduct of consumer research.
From left to right: Karen Winterich, Stefan Wuyts, Meg Meloy
What do coeditors do?
Before getting there, what do marketing scholars do? Like other research scholars, we try to understand the world, little by little. Adopting the scientific method, we observe, describe and explain emerging business phenomena. Marketing scholars often go beyond description and explanation and derive normative recommendations for key stakeholders (consumers, managers, policy makers).
When thoroughly vetted via a stringent review process, a small portion of papers eventually get published in premier marketing journals, at which point they impact other scholars and move the field forward — one step at a time. Philosophers of science called this “normal science.” A renowned colleague at a school I was affiliated with previously called it “scribbling in the margin.” These steps and scribbles then accumulate into the field’s “body of knowledge.”
The coeditor’s first job is to decide whether a submission reaches the bar to be sent out for review. Multiple reviewers then write reports in which they critically assess the paper. An area editor summarizes the key concerns, adds their own feedback and offers a recommendation to the coeditor. The coeditor then makes the final call. When inviting a revision, they prioritize key concerns and offer a roadmap to the authors, a path to publication. It usually takes authors months to resubmit a revised manuscript, which then goes through the same cycle — until the coeditor accepts the paper. As coeditor, the buck stops with you.
In our first editorial for IJRM, we described four roles of coeditors: (1) as curator, protecting the product of scholarship; (2) as negotiator, brokering between authors and reviewers; (3) as tutor, calling out outdated paradigmatic presumptions but also welcoming new perspectives; and (4) as midwife, easing the passage of genuinely new ideas into the world.
What a time to be a coeditor!
As track chair at the European Marketing Academy (EMAC) Doctoral Colloquium, I have been fortunate enough to provide feedback to well over a hundred doctoral students in marketing strategy from across the world. What a wealth of promising young scholars! I look forward to helping them to find their way to IJRM with their very best ideas. As director of the Institute for the Study of Business Markets since fall 2019 (the world’s leading research institute advancing the theory and practice of business-to-business marketing), I interact as often as I can with marketing executives to understand what keeps them awake at night. What a wealth of new marketing challenges!
This is a perfect time to have an impact on the evolution of the marketing field. As the eyes and ears of many firms, marketing must weigh in as firms and societies face some of the biggest challenges of our times. Marketing scholarship has started taking up the gauntlet, shifting attention to fundamental transformations associated with sustainability and artificial intelligence. More work is required to address the “big and hairy” problems of our times, such as the dramatic impact of climate change, privacy and fakery concerns and new market forms. These transformations impact consumers, firms, markets, and livelihoods. They put in question much of what we consider to be “received wisdom” of the marketing field. While the marketing field has always been in a state of flux, the degree of change today is extraordinary and unabated.
As coeditors, Karen, Meg, and I are offered an unparalleled view on the scope of the field and new directions and insights. At IJRM, we handle more than 1,000 papers per year. It is hard to overestimate how much we learn from our interactions with all these authors. These insights in turn change us as scholars, as we teach marketing, recruit and work with new students and faculty, and think about our own next scribbles. It is an honor to be able to help marketing scholars publish top-notch research that will, in the aggregate, reshape the marketing field and, hopefully, help consumers, managers, and policy makers navigate a changing world.
