روش تاریخی Golder در تحقیقات بازاریابی

This article reviews a seminal article in the historical marketing literature — “Historical Method in Marketing Research: With New Evidence on Long-Term Market Share Stability” (Golder, 2000). The present study uses citation analysis and commentary to consider the contributions of Golder (2000) to the marketing discipline. This review explores why the article is seminal and how Golder's article influences marketing historical research. Golder's article is important for two main reasons. First for its findings, which contradict commonly held beliefs about long-term market share stability, though the relevant literature largely ignores these findings. The literature does recognize Golder's (2000) second contribution of the historical method: his article offers clear guidelines to new and emerging research in historical marketing.

According to Armstrong, 2003, academic literature in marketing does not provide many important findings. Criteria to judge if findings are important are whether or not they are replicable, valid, useful, and surprising (Armstrong, 2003). Golder (2000) is one article that fits these criteria. Golder's article presents a method for historical research and uses the method to analyze the commonly held belief that market share is stable over time. Golder analyses Kotler's (1997, p. 352) statement, “19 out of 25 companies who were market leaders in 1923 were still market leaders in 1983.” Using his historical method Golder (2000) finds this statement to be incorrect. Woodside (2009) states that multiple methods are necessary for evaluating the importance of findings. Possible importance metrics include the number of citations in general, the average number of citations per article in that year, and the number of citations in high impact journals. The present article evaluates the importance of Golder's (2000) findings based on Armstrong's (2003) criteria and citation analysis (Woodside, 2009). This paper concludes that Golder's (2000) article is important not only because of the surprising findings, but as achieving seminal article recognition for the historical method in marketing. The present study shows that though Golder presents important findings that contradict a commonly held belief, the relevant literature largely ignores these findings.

The present article discusses the two major contributions of Golder (2000) .The fi rst is his detailed description of the historical method that places the method in a more positivist position, giving the method high legitimacy. Golder's details on the historical method sythesizes the historical method literature facilitating more historical research in marketing. The second contribution is the important and surprising fi nding that a well-known fi nding for market share leadership ( Kotler, 1997; Carpenter and Nakamoto, 1989 ) is invalid. Not withstanding these two contributions, the level of citations of Golder (2000) is much lower than would be expected of such an article. This conclusion suggests that the fi ndings of Golder's (2000) historical analysis are largely ignored and instead, the key contribution that literature focuses on is Golder's presentation on the historical method