COVID 19: ASK A MARKETING PROFESSOR
The pandemic is over a year old and still there is much we don’t know. Since the beginning we have been relying on doctors, expert epidemiologists, public health officials, and others to inform us but in fact what we really need is marketing professors.
Think about it, as the world begins to get vaccinated discussions are beginning around what the impact of vaccination is on infection rates and how soon societies will be able to ‘open up’. Well, if you want expertise on infection symptoms and the relative benefit and side effects of vaccines, ask the doctors or epidemiologists. However, if you want to know how people act faced with this information, or how to convince them they should take the vaccine, it is probably marketing professors you should ask. They are the ones doing the research in this area.
Or what about the contract dispute between AstraZeneca (AZ) and the European Union that meant AZ underdelivered by 90 million doses or so? You see a lot of contract lawyers opining on Twitter (e.g. https://twitter.com/SpinningHugo/status/1355125338729230338?s=20) but mostly what they are discussing is orthogonal to the actual issue. Instead you need marketing professors, or more specifically the subset that study interorganizational governance. These experts are the ones that know how contract disputes of this nature are resolved, they know the contract is important but for the most part not invoked, and they know how to solve such problems.
So, sure there’s a place for epidemiologists, health journalists, and health policy experts but if you want to understand many of the key issues of the COVID pandemic ask a Marketing Professor.
Many thanks to Koen Pauwels and Erik Mooi for suggestions on previous drafts of this.
