Dr Scott G. Dacko is Associate Professor of Marketing and Strategic Management at Warwick Business School in the UK. He has both academic and practical business experience, and his dictionary aims to be useful in both worlds.
Containing in the region of 520 entries The Advanced Dictionary of Marketing distinguishes itself by concentrating on marketing theory rather than basic vocabulary. Introducing the Dictionary, Dacko explains that:
… although there have been dozens of marketing dictionaries written over the decades, what is lacking in each is an emphasis on laws, theories, concepts, and effects… In marketing, and disciplines closely related to marketing, much peer‐reviewed journal research has been performed in support of the identification and development of advanced conceptual terminology, yet little work seems to find its way into marketing dictionaries.
A dictionary that foregrounds scholarship fills a gap in the market. The Advanced Dictionary of Marketing is therefore aimed at the researchers, practicing marketers, academics and “advanced” students who are failed by run‐of‐the‐mill marketing dictionaries which do not link professional practice to the findings of research. Dacko's audience do not need a definition of “advertising” but an understanding of theories of advertising effectiveness and an explanation of what those theories mean for advertisers.
International in scope, The Advanced Dictionary covers a broad range of theories, laws, concepts, “effects” and models drawn from the academic literature of subjects including economics, management, psychology, and sociology. Concepts which are believed to be too specialised for the dictionary format are excluded. No examples of such omissions are provided in Dacko's introduction, but there is an entry on Marketing Approaches, which provides three helpful lists. First: a lengthy listing of all the forms of marketing covered by the dictionary (from “above‐the‐line marketing” to “WWW marketing”). Second: a short illustrative list of some approaches advocated in popular business books (such as “Gonzo Marketing” and “Testosterone‐Free Marketing”). Third: a list of specific varieties such as “aquaculture marketing”, “e‐mail marketing”, and “hospitality marketing”. The latter two lists are, we are told, outside the scope of the dictionary. Yet “ethical marketing”, “government marketing”, “multicultural marketing” and “destination/location/place marketing” all appear both in the list of “highly specific” terms which are supposed to be excluded and the list of marketing approaches which are included – and they do in fact have entries.
Specialisms like “aquaculture marketing” may not belong here (the list is never‐ending: I can think of “library marketing”, “airline marketing”, and “wine marketing” as areas of significant publishing activity which are not mentioned at all), but then why is “sports marketing” covered? Looking for what was missing, I found no mention of “postmodern marketing” (e.g. Brown, 1995), or the use of humour (e.g. Gulas and Weinberger, 2006), or sex and eroticism (e.g. Reichert and Lambiase, 2003) in marketing. To aim for exhaustive coverage of every manifestation of marketing would be impractical, but a clearer statement of the criteria for inclusion and exclusion, and a consistent application of the criteria, is needed.
The Advanced Dictionary seems reasonably up to date in its coverage. A term such as “wikimarketing” (so new it does not – at the time of writing – have its own Wikipedia entry, yet!) appears in the entry for Online Marketing, and Blog Marketing has its own entry. On the other hand, I could not find any mention of “neuromarketing” (a term coined in 2002), where brain imaging technology is used to try to measure customer responses and preferences (e.g. Renvoisé and Morin, 2007).
Every entry consists of six elements: a descriptive definition; a summary of theoretical “key insights”; index terms; an explanation of practical implications; further readings in the areas of application of the concept; a bibliography. Most of the items listed under further reading and in bibliographies are references to academic journal literature; some books are included, and there are a very few URLs. The cited material is reasonably current, but includes older, classic works where appropriate. I noticed that some of the books listed are old editions. For example: Aaker, Kumar and Day's Marketing Research is cited in its sixth edition (1998), but the ninth edition was published in 2007; Craig and Douglas' International Marketing Research appears in its first edition (1983), but we are now up to the third edition (2005). The entries are concisely written and seem to be broadly accurate, but some are not as critical as might be expected. The entry on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Theory draws attention to research challenging its validity, but the entry on Psychoanalytic Theory ignores the existence of serious objections.
The main sequence of entries is alphabetical word‐by‐word, but two indexes and an appendix are included as additional points of entry. The first index is tabular and cross‐references each entry with its applications in ten areas of marketing, plus “others”: if your interest is international marketing, for example, this helps locate relevant entries. The second index is thesaurus‐like, an alphabetical list of descriptive keywords referring users to particular entries. The appendix is a classified list of key terms, categorising each entry as a law, a theory, a concept, or an effect (e.g. research biases, fallacies and errors, and syndromes). These headings are then further sub‐categorised. All this apparatus is somewhat confusing to use at first, but it starts to make sense with practice.
Taken as a whole, this dictionary (perhaps uniquely) creates a real sense of marketing as a discipline. This makes it closer in spirit to an encyclopedia, while the brevity of the entries keeps it in the dictionary camp. A comparison with two single‐volume marketing encyclopedias (Lewis and Littler (1999) and Baker (1999)) found that Dacko's approach was distinctive enough to make it the first stop for some types of enquiry. Sutherland and Canwell (2004) is perhaps the nearest functional equivalent, but Dacko complements rather than replicates it: his “advanced” focus makes the difference. Where Sutherland and Canwell explain the different meanings of a term like Halo Effect, Dacko identifies it as a form of cognitive bias. On the other hand, The Advanced Dictionary's inflexible highly‐structured entry template can make it look regimented and dry compared to Sutherland and Canwell, who include tables, flow‐charts, and other diagrams to break up the text: in this respect The Advanced Dictionary suffers if you compare its entry for Hierarchy of Needs Theory with Sutherland and Canwell's Maslow, Abraham entry, yet Dacko's text has more to offer beyond undergraduate level.
Nevertheless, Dacko succeeds in unearthing material and detail buried by other sources, in a more organized and scholarly way than is usual with dictionaries. The Advanced Dictionary of Marketing will be a useful addition to academic library reference collections, alongside (but not replacing) traditional marketing dictionaries and encyclopedias.
