Doctoral programs in business-to-business marketing: Status and prospects

PhD programs in Business-to-Business Marketing are under increasing pressure to bring both more rigor and relevance to their training processes. We report on an empirical investigation on the practices and needed developments in Marketing PhD programs, focusing specifically on Business Marketing. Based on a sample of 41 programs worldwide, we find widespread agreement that the rigor/relevance challenge is even greater for Business Marketing scholars than for their colleagues who concentrate on the consumer market. Business Marketing PhDs deal with products with hard to understand uses and benefits, often exchanged in non-public markets with relatively few customers. These challenges lead us to recommend, among other things, that we must recruit PhDs from non-traditional sources and encourage them to partner with scholars from methodological and scientific disciplines to increase both rigor and relevance in their work.