We are pleased to announce The 2012 Theory & Practice in Marketing (TPM) Conference on Marketing Strategy. Harvard Business School will host the conference on May 4-5, 2012 in Boston. The focus of the conference will be on substantive marketing strategy issues, rather than on methodologies.

The 2012 Theory & Practice in Marketing (TPM) Conference on
Marketing Strategy
Harvard Business School
May 4-5, 2012
Boston, MA, USA

The Origin of TPM

A large number of scholars believe that the marketing field has moved away from addressing substantive problems and has focused instead on methodological issues. While rigorous methods are essential to scientific progress, a lack of substantive focus can quickly make our field irrelevant. There are already strong indications that our journals have no major impact on the decision making of line managers or senior marketing professionals.

We hope that TPM will become an annual conference and it will encourage marketing scholars to address important and relevant substantive questions in the marketing field.  Thus, for the 2012 TPM conference, we have chosen one of the most essential topics of our field: marketing strategy.

TPM began with a 2011 symposium supported by Columbia Business School and Harvard Business School that was organized by Professors Bernd Schmitt, Donald Lehmann and Sunil Gupta, and brought together more than 80 marketing professors from leading business schools.

On this website, we look forward to a continuing conversation about the issues of bridging theory and practice in marketing, with an aim to work together to achieve more tangible connections between academia and marketing practice.

We encourage you to:

• Login to the site, if you were an attendee of the conference
• Or, if you are new to the TPM community, request a membership
• Visit the forum, to continue the conference discussion
• Share any projects you are pursuing that focus on relevant marketing research