Reviewers as developmental coaches
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EDITORIAL
Reviewers as developmental coaches Mark B. Houston 1 & John Hulland 2
# Academy of Marketing Science 2020
As the two of us (as editors) begin putting together our third volume of the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS), and look ahead to a second editorial “tour of duty,” we believe it is an appropriate time to reflect on our experiences to date and offer some guidance to our journal reviewers. In doing so, it is our aim to provide a fresh perspective on the reviewer’s role. Our field has a long history of articles and editorials offering excellent and practical guidance on writing reviews (e.g., Bagchi et al. 2017; Lehmann and Winer 2017; Moorman et al. 2019), so rather than simply echoing this earlier advice, in what follows we use the analogy of hit song-making. We certainly encourage reviewers to abide by the best practices highlighted in the aforementioned articles, but our main objective for this editorial is to inspire reviewers to re-envision their role when evaluating manuscripts for possible publication in JAMS. Why song-making? As music aficionados, we believe that the process of writing, refining, and recording a song demonstrated on NBC’s hit show Songland can be seen as very analogous to the process of crafting, revising, and publishing a scholarly paper. In Songland, three unknown, aspiring songwriters (who survive an initial screening round) get the career-altering opportunity to pitch a song to a guest national recording artist (e.g., Martina McBride, Macklemore, Usher) who ultimately chooses one of those songs to record. The show begins with each young songwriter performing a “first look” of
* Mark B. Houston [email protected] 1
Department of Marketing, Neeley School of Business, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX, USA
2
Department of Marketing, Terry College of Business, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
their song for a panel of experienced songwriters and the guest artist. After the panelists and artist deliberate, each songwriter is matched with one panelist “coach” with whom they collaborate to improve their song’s lyrics, flow, instrumentation, musical structure, etc. The songwriters perform their revised songs, the guest artist makes their final choice, and the artist then records the song for release. Many of these songs have gone on to hit #1 on an iTunes chart. In nearly all cases, the constructive criticism and guidance from the panelists that the unknown songwriters receive make the revised songs better. And in many cases, the sum of the many seemingly minor changes can be magical; the songwriter’s original vision and spirit shine through in a new way as aspects of the early draft that were distracting, poorly executed, or poorly fitting are pared away, refined, and improved. This process sometimes leaves “the songwriters standing there, stunned, open-mouthed with amazement as their songs transform into something bigger and grander” (Stetson 2019). We identify three key takeaways from observing the Songland experience. First, the resultin
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