Unveiling Unsophistication the Use of Theory in International Advertising Research in the Top Three Advertising Journals 2002-2012

Abstract

International advertising research is suffering from a long-term ailment: theoretical unsophistication. Over 25 years ago, Miracle (1984: 157) noted that theory in the field was “exceedingly underdeveloped” and recently Taylor (2007) named the lack of theoretical sophistication as the greatest obstacle for international advertising research being published in the most prestigious marketing and business journals. Indeed, today journals like the Journal of Marketing (Kohli 2011) and the Journal of International Business Studies (Bello and Kostova 2012) expect submitted manuscripts to include a theoretical contribution and that expectation makes the field’s inability to deliver theoretical sophistication over such a long period of time all the more surprising. We contend that one of the major barriers stopping researchers from addressing this shortcoming has been the lack of a precise analysis of the nature of the problem beyond the generic diagnosis, i.e., one that makes specific how theoretical unsophistication has manifested itself in research so far. Such analysis is necessary because marketing researchers have so far failed to agree on what theory is (Crittenden and Peterson 2011). Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore the theoretical unsophistication of international advertising research published in the top three advertising journals in the past decade. To achieve this objective, this paper firstly explores the notions of theory and theoretical sophistication on the basis of the broader management and marketing literatures; secondly, it develops two research propositions on the theoretical unsophistication of international advertising research; thirdly, it tests those propositions on the basis of an analysis of systematically selected journal articles published in the three most highly regarded advertising journals, i.e., Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, and Journal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising, over the past decade.