In business research, many discoveries are born in data, through models, regressions, and carefully controlled experiments. But University of Washington Foster School of Business Professors Robert W. Palmatier and Suresh Kotha argue that before there can be data, there must first be ideas.
Their recent Journal of Marketing paper, “Conceptual Research: Multidisciplinary Insights for Marketing,” makes the case that theory — not data — is the true starting point for scientific progress.
“Typically, the big ideas come out in the conceptual work,” says Palmatier, the John C. Narver Chair in Business Administration at Foster. “Empirical research is critical, but it’s often the conceptual work that really changes the way people think about things.”
Reclaiming the Front End of Discovery
During his time as editor of the Journal of Marketing, Palmatier noticed that the papers sparking the most influence weren’t always data-driven.
“I came to realize that conceptual research is the work that typically gets cited the most,” he says. “It often makes the biggest impact. It really changes the way people think about things.”
That realization inspired the project. “I wanted to put out a paper that both promotes conceptual research and shows the benefit of doing it,” he explains. “It was really a piece to try to get more conceptual research done in marketing.”
Palmatier has seen why such work can be overlooked. “There’s a lot of focus on empirical because the tools are so much more powerful today,” he says. “You have all these new empirical approaches and it does so much that researchers want to leverage its capabilities.”
That’s where Suresh Kotha, the Battelle/Olsen Excellence Chair in Management, came in. Kotha’s field has a deeper tradition of conceptual research.
“In management, we’ve had an entire journal, Academy of Management Review, dedicated to theory pieces for a long time,” he says. “Marketing doesn’t have that yet, and as a result, fewer people are trained to think conceptually or write conceptual papers.”
Five Pathways to Big Ideas
Kotha’s key contribution was creating a framework that outlines five distinct pathways for developing conceptual research, ranging from creating entirely new paradigms that challenge fundamental assumptions to integrating existing research through comprehensive reviews. “That’s where most of my time was spent,” he says.
Beyond identifying these pathways, the paper provides a practical, step-by-step process to help scholars develop conceptual articles — from identifying problems to synthesizing information to writing effectively.
Palmatier says the framework helps scholars think big before they think small.
“I often push my doctoral students to first do a conceptual paper before they dive into empirical work,” he explains. “It lets them think big. Once the ideas are out there, the testing follows.”
Crossing Disciplinary Lines
Working with co-authors Irina V. Kozlenkova, Caleb Warren, and Reihane Boghrat, Palmatier and Kotha analyzed nearly 2,000 conceptual articles across multiple disciplines.
Their analysis revealed something surprising: Marketing’s conceptual research has a greater influence on other fields than it does on marketing itself. That wasn’t what they expected.
Palmatier attributes that imbalance to the way marketing scholars are trained.
“A lot of people in marketing come from psychology or economics,” he explains. “So they look back to those base disciplines for theory. There’s a sense that’s where the ‘serious’ theory comes from.”
Still, he notes, “Other fields look to marketing because it’s the most proximate discipline — the one closest to exchange and relationships.”
Kotha sees the same pattern from his side. “Marketing brings more understanding of the consumer side — the demand side,” he says. “That’s incredibly valuable for strategy scholars like me, who often focus on the supply side — what companies can offer and do. That’s where supply and demand come together.”
Suresh Kotha is a Professor of Management and the Olesen/Battelle Excellence Chair in Entrepreneurship. He also serves as Research Director of the Arthur W. Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship.
From Ancient Exchange to Emerging Technology
When Palmatier talks about the power of conceptual thinking, he connects the ancient and the modern.
“You can look at some of the earliest discussions of marketing all the way back to the Iliad and the Odyssey,” he says. “People did exchange, they did trade, and it was based on relationships—and we still do the same thing today.”
That sense of continuity drives the team’s call for new theory in fast-changing areas. Their research highlights four topics ripe for conceptual work:artificial intelligence, virtual avatars, crowdsourcing, and privacy. In these areas, technology is outpacing existing conceptual frameworks.
“If you make an avatar look real human, but it’s dumb, that really bothers people,” Palmatier says. “You’re better off if you have a dumb avatar to have it look dumb.”
The insight, he adds, goes deeper than design.
“We’re using the same brain when we interface with a chat box avatar as we did when we dealt with a person a couple thousand years ago,” he says.
That’s why new conceptual models are needed to explain what’s happening in these emerging contexts, but building off of the same underlying psychological foundations.
Teaching People to Think Big
For Kotha, conceptual research is a means of teaching students how to think critically. In his doctoral seminars, he uses it to train future scholars to identify patterns and mechanisms before they ever start testing hypotheses.
“Writing conceptual papers forces you to think about how variables come together and how they relate,” he says. “It’s a very useful exercise because it forces critical thinking before you ever touch data.”
He also brings that mindset into his Foster MBA and executive education courses, encouraging students to look beyond individual cases and see the underlying logic behind business outcomes.
“We might study Starbucks, we might study Costco, we might study Tesla,” he says. “But the ultimate goal is you understand how these things come together — what patterns do you see, what relates to what? In a few years, you won’t remember Tesla, you won’t remember Starbucks. What you’ll remember is the patterns of how these variables relate to each other.”
Palmatier notes that conceptual work is typically “the front end of the academic spear.” Once the frameworks have been tested and supported, they naturally filter into textbooks, case studies, and classroom discussion — particularly for business practitioners like those he teaches in Foster’s Executive MBA program.
But for both scholars, conceptual thinking ultimately comes down to the same goal: helping people think bigger.
Robert W. Palmatier is a Professor of Marketing and the John C. Narver Endowed Professor in Business Administration. He also serves as Research Director of the Center for Sales and Marketing Strategy.
Why Big Ideas Still Matter
Ultimately, Palmatier sees conceptual research as a call to intellectual ambition.
“We shouldn’t shy away from things just because there’s no data available right now,” he says. “I would never compare ourselves to Einstein, but in some cases, people are dead by the time their ideas are proven. Think big. There’ll be people out there to test it.”
Kotha agrees. “That’s how research progresses: It builds on papers one after the other,” he says. “And then we come to a consensus of what is agreed upon, what’s not agreed upon.”
Both scholars share the same message: Lasting progress in business and academia begins with new and innovative ideas.
Read the research paper here.
Suresh Kotha is Professor of Management, Olesen/Battelle Excellence Chair in Entrepreneurship, and Research Director of the Arthur W. Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship at the Foster School of Business.
Robert W. Palmatier is Professor of Marketing, John C. Narver Endowed Professor in Business Administration, and Research Director of the Center for Sales and Marketing Strategy at the Foster School of Business.