Process Thinking and the Practice of
Marketing
Peter R. Dickson
Ryder Eminent Scholar in Global Logistics
Chapman College of Business Administration
Florida International University
11200 SW 8th Street – UP RB301
Miami, Florida 33199
T 305.942.7065 – F 305.348.3792
dicksonp@fiu.edu
March 2011
Process Thinking and The Practice of Marketing: Dickson
Process Thinking and the Practice of Marketing
Abstract
In this paper the central role of business process thinking in microeconomic, behavioral and
evolutionary theories of competition is explained. Building upon this multi-theory
foundation, the primacy of innovation and diffusion of innovation process thinking in
creating value, wealth and capital is deduced from basic economic premises. Given the
predominant role of marketers in managing service/product development and the diffusing of
the resulting innovation, a number of provocative questions, implications and conclusions are
then presented.
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Process Thinking and The Practice of Marketing: Dickson
Business process thinking is thinking about sequences of business tasks, activities, methods,
practices and techniques involving the combination of material inputs, technology and human
labor to produce a desired output. It is also the mundane thinking about what you and others
do, should do and should not do at work. It is the thinking that occurs while learning-bydoing, learning by observing, and imagining business processes. Process thinking skill
includes process learning and remembering, process mapping, input-output process flow
analysis, creative process thinking and higher-order business process thinking. An example
of a process thinking exercise that requires imagination and creativity is presented in the box
below. A detailed description of some dimensions of business process thinking aptitude and
an illustrative business process thinking self-assessment scale are presented in the Appendix.
In the movie Die Hard with a Vengeance Bruce Willis is presented with the task of placing four gallons of
water on a scales or a bomb will blow him up. He has a three gallon plastic jug and a five gallon plastic jug and
is beside a water fountain. How does he get four gallons? Here are his possible activities.
Activity
Description of activity
A
Fill 3 gallon from fountain
B.
Fill 5 gallon from fountain
C
Pour 3-gallon jug into five gallon jug
D
Pour 5 gallon jug into 3- gallon jug
E
Empty 3 gallon jug into fountain
F
Empty 5 gallon jug into fountain
Describe the activity sequence that gets 4 gallons as a string of letters e.g. ADBCEF
Business process thinking is the thinking behind the sequences of tasks that create economic
added-value chains (Porter 1985) and customer value (Hammer 2002). It is the know-how
thinking skill behind continuous process improvement (Robson 1991) sometimes described
as procedural knowledge (Winograd 1975) and learning-by-doing (Solow 1997). It is what
Fredrick W. Taylor called thinking about working smarter (Drucker 1991) and according to
Peter Drucker it is what today’s knowledge workers must be skilled at for mature western
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Process Thinking and The Practice of Marketing: Dickson
economies to compete against booming emerging economies with low cost labor markets. In
this paper, it is explained how business process thinking has its roots in biological evolution
and is a core construct in microeconomics, behavioral economics, evolutionary economics
and, most importantly, in the theory and practice of innovation, diffusion of innovation and
marketing practice in service dominated economies.
Biological evolution and natural selection on process thinking
Endowed process thinking must be subject to natural selection because it has been so vital to
humankind’s survival and evolutionary success. It was primitive process thinking that led to
our species first tool use. Improving tool crafting (production) also required process thinking.
Process thinking and process improvements led to collective, group survival processes such
as hunting, cooking and farming. Skills at making and keeping fire, making and breaking
camp, capturing, domesticating, breeding and husbanding animals, selecting, storing and
planting seeds, irrigating and weeding crops, making bronze and then iron and the endless
streams of technological innovations that followed all involved process learning and process
improvement thinking skill. So has the trading and diffusion of services and products that
have gone through many transportation and communication technology revolutions ever
extending the way we trade, who we trade with and where we trade.
Evolution has selected our genetic make-up to be superior at process thinking that learns,
remembers, improves and invents processes: thinking that designs, implements and adapts
processes combining the activities of other humans, animals and technology. “If I do this and
then that, using this and then that,” has to have been one of the earliest types of conscious
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Process Thinking and The Practice of Marketing: Dickson
human thinking. When it became “If you help by doing this and then that, using this and then
that,” then the genes behind brain development that increased process thinking ability
coevolved with our cooperation genes. Such genes would have further coevolved with
language at the time that names for things and the process of putting words together to
describe, suggest, instruct and teach “this, that and then” were invented: that is, when nouns
and action words/verbs were invented. Imagining processes coevolved with the power of
collaborating and talking to others and talking to ourselves. Process thinking aptitude is that
central to the development of being human.
Since the industrial revolution process thinking skill has increasingly involved incorporating
ever new waves of technology and usage skill into production and consumption processes.
The pace of technological change, particularly with the way humans communicate/socialize
and the use of machines and computer control systems, has greatly accelerated. For most of
its existence, humankind has lived in small tribes where the tribe used the same tools,
animals and work processes for generation after generation, even for hundreds of
generations. Very occasionally this was disturbed by transformational innovation. Today, we
go through several transformational generations of technology within a working career (e.g.,
typewriter, electric-typewriter, word-processor, PC, notepad, netpad, iPad)….and dread the
new user manual or simply do not read it, or read a bit of it. Rather than laziness or
disinterest, is this a symptom that our genetically inherited process thinking systems have not
been able to evolve fast enough for the process thinking and rethinking demands of the
modern high technology world? Such a possibility also speaks to our ability to continually
improve work processes, an increasingly important competitive imperative (Dickson 1992).
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Process Thinking and The Practice of Marketing: Dickson
In such a “mind stretching” environment our ability to develop domain specific process
thinking skill through deliberate practice (Adam Smith’s concept of labor specialization, writ
large in mind rather than muscle) has come to the fore. It is variation in process thinking
aptitude that largely determines our response to process practice and ultimately our business
process learning and improvement skill. Some people are naturally endowed to be a lot better
at process thinking, process learning and process adaptation, and hence to find it a lot easier.
This variation in process thinking aptitude does not need to be empirically proven as its
presence has been and still is an essential driver of our very evident evolution of processes
and process thinking: evolution requires variation (Dickson 2003). 10,000 hours working on
a process be it a golf swing, a backhand, a surgical procedure, a production-line process, or
selling to a new prospect creates extraordinary process thinking expertise and knowledge in
some people….and mindless routinization in yet others (Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Romer
1993; Gladwell 2008; Colvin 2008). …whether desired or not!
Business schools research and teach best (or at least better) business practice and processes.
But a lot of business process thinking skill has to do with taking what has been learned and
implementing it in a unique and often eccentric organization (i.e., our work places). The
latter takes special process thinking aptitude, a special type of smarts which evolved through
genetic selection in deep time. Again, the mean and variance in process thinking aptitude
evolved across human populations and it is the variance that is of particular interest. High
aptitude can be polished by thousands of hours of thought and practice into process expertise.
But when their process thinking aptitude is low it may be difficult to teach a business student
or executive a best practice, very difficult for them to unlearn a routine and replace it with a
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Process Thinking and The Practice of Marketing: Dickson
better practice, and almost impossible to teach them to think about process improvement for
themselves. Such variance in aptitude has an economic bottom-line.
Where microeconomics ends and process thinking starts
According to its Wikipedia definition, microeconomics studies the decisions and behaviors
that determine supply and demand which determine price which determine the decisions and
behaviors of buyers and sellers. This is a dynamic feedback process that is called growth
theory when positive feedback effects dominate and Walrasian equilibrium economics when
negative feedback effects dominate. The study of decisions and behavior in markets where
supplier offerings (services and products) are differentiated on quality, features, and
distribution is called monopolistic competition (Chamberlin 1933; Robinson 1933). In this
most common type of competition between more or less differentiated brands, each supplier
possesses its own supply curve and faces its own demand curve in the standard neoclassic
two-dimensional price by quantity analysis that is taught in Economics 101.
The shape of the supply curve in the price by quantity analysis is determined by supply input
costs. The next “but why” question that needs to be answered is what determines the firm’s
supply and supply-chain processes that determine the costs and cost structure that determine
the firm’s supply curve? It is the process thinking of the firm’s process designers and
implementers, accumulated over time (Dickson 2003). This process thinking also determines
the service, product and distribution differentiation that determines consumer preferences and
shapes the firm’s brand specific demand curve. The study of such process thinking is, in a
sense, micro-microeconomics. It can also be conceived of as the next level of analysis and
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theorizing about market and marketing competition, above the analysis of the competition
between processes (Nelson and Winter 1982; Dickson 1992; Teece, Pisano and Shuen 1997;
Eisenhardt, and Martin 2000) which is itself a level of analysis above competition between
services, products and their supply curves. As we now establish, process thinking is also the
fundamental paradigmatic unit of analysis (Kuhn 1962) in behavioral and evolutionary
economics.
Behavioral economics and process rationality
One of the least appreciated contributions Herbert Simon made to behavioral economics was
his conclusion that rationality (logical thinking) is procedural rationality (process rationality)
(Simon 1976; 1978). He shifted “his” paradigm by declaring that the key unit of analysis in
management science and economics is the process that leads to outcomes: be the outcomes
judgments, decisions, resource/capital deployment, services or products. Simon’s
contribution is characterized as being underappreciated because it has not led to a flourishing
field of academic study of process thinking skill. Managerial economics has been taught for
many decades and operations research has existed for even longer but neither of these
disciplines that focus on highly rational resource allocation processes/algorithms/artificial
intelligence have ventured into the study of process thinking skill. In marketing, there has
been some theorizing about how competition between the marketing procedural rationality of
firms (competitive rationality) keeps markets in permanent disequilibrium (Dickson 1992)
but the marketing literature on selecting marketers, salespeople and service workers is silent
about procedural rationality or process thinking skill.
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According to Simon what businesses need are economists/managers who develop on-the-job
problem solving processes in the real world of the factory and sales office and not profit
maximization solutions in a simplified model of the firm. This requires “a basic shift in
scientific style, from an emphasis on deductive reasoning within a tight system of axioms to
an emphasis on detailed empirical exploration of complex algorithms of thought.” (Simon
1976, p.147). The complex algorithms of thought are the thoughts about on-the-job work
processes in the real world of the factory and sales office.
In his essay on the mind as a scarce resource Simon (1978) concluded that the major bound
on procedural rationality is not the lack of perfect information but the quality and quantity of
attention to and processing of the information (e.g., service costs or customer preferences)
that is available. The quality of the thinking about the management process that is being
thought about is key. Experts are high quality thinkers and they possess a “sixth” sense about
how to go about tackling problems in their domain of expertise (Prietula and Simon 1989):
that is, their process thinking is both conscious and intuitive (subconscious). As expert
schedulers of processes they also understand the “psychology of scheduling” (Prietula and
Simon 1989, p.123), they take initiative and when they lead meetings “things get done.”
Experts are organization savvy and well networked with their giving and taking of process
expertise (Prietula and Simon 1989; see also Kelley and Caplan 1993, and Griffin et al.
2009). The managerial implication of Simon’s process thinking paradigm is first hire and pay
for skilled process thinkers because such superior minds are a scarce resource. Second,
support them so they can do what they do well which is deliberately improve business
processes and procedures, techniques, methods, and best practices.
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Process Thinking and The Practice of Marketing: Dickson
Economic evolution and market selection on process thinking
Nelson and Winter’s (1982) conceptualized business operational routines (largely mindlessly
executed) shaped by (largely mindfully executed) higher-order search and learning processes.
Their system dynamic modeling of imitative and innovative learning processes that drive
change in operational routines has considerably enriched understanding of how business
processes, economic organizations and markets evolve. Using the fundamental principles and
mechanisms of general evolutionary theory (rather than crude analogy with biological
evolution) Dickson (2003) developed and extended Nelson and Winter’s explanation of
economic evolution. Their rudimentary operational-search process taxonomy was expanded
into a hierarchy of nested organization processes where learning processes drive resource
deployment processes that drive system control processes that drive operational added-value
processes. This hierarchy evolves through market competitive selection on the process
selection skills (the process thinking) of past and present managers. But Nelson and Winter’s
seminal work and Dickson’s additional theorizing have also yet to spawn a field of empirical
study into business process improvement thinking.
Why is process thinking improvement important to marketing?
As important as process thinking may be to explaining the evolution of humankind,
explaining competition and the rational behavior of managers and firms, why should the
continued presence of a process thinking black-box be a concern of marketing theory and
marketing practice? Is it not a topic for study by management researchers, behavioral
economists or cognitive psychologists?
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Answering these questions first requires recognizing that the thinking of managers is just as
important to the understanding of marketing management as the thinking of consumers and
the latter has been unquestionably widely studied by marketing scholars. The former has not.
Second, answering the questions invites the consideration of a big idea: that marketer process
thinking is the central paradigmatic construct in the theory of value, wealth and capital
creation. If this is true then improving the process thinking of marketers is really important.
According to its official definition “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and
processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value
for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” (American Marketing Association
2007). The objective of the next section is to establish that marketers do more than create or
co-create value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large, which is already quite a
lot of responsibility. Institutional marketing processes and activities are also the primary
creators of such institutions’ profits and capital. This omission from the official definition of
marketing significantly understates the importance of marketer process thinking in advancing
the wealth and prosperity of economic organizations and the societies within which they are
embedded. Whether advancing the public good or creating private capital, the claim is that
the means to either of these ends is superior marketer process thinking.
Marketing and utility, value, wealth and capital creation process thinking
The ultimate big picture, meta-analysis in market research and economics is surely the
historical review of how markets evolved and how and why economic organizations and
trading empires have come and gone. The history of the evolution of economies and
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particularly the 250 year-old industrial revolution (e.g., Landes 1969; 1998; Mokyr 1990)
reveals in story after story and in these stories’ historic synthesis that the primary wealth and
capital creation processes of economic organizations, markets and economies are their skills
in: (1) service and product innovation, and, (2) trading and diffusing such innovation.
Before deducing why this is so we need to briefly pause and clarify some important
distinctions and confusions that may arise. First, the purpose of capital investment is to create
returns that increase the capital of the investor. But it is not the capital, per se, or the risktaking of its owner that “creates” the returns and capital growth. Neither does the labor of the
worker (proletariat) create capital. Both are factor inputs into an added-value process that
starts with service/product development and ends with diffusion of the service/product.
Second, fortunes have always been made trading in managed markets that are monopolized,
licensed, fixed, price rigged or that, in other ways, exploit the lack of freedom or ignorance
of buyers and sellers. Such wealth and capital creation should not be confused with the
extraordinary growth and capital creation engine of the past 250 years of innovation and its
diffusion. Third, the contemporary skill of CEOs and CFOs (and their compensation
consultants) in appropriating profits earned and capital created from past and present
innovation and diffusion of innovation processes should not be confused with the past and
present process thinking skill of others that created such profits and capital.
The inherent utility and wealth creation potential of innovation
The first basic economic principle used to explain the utility and wealth creation of
innovation is dynamic service/product differentiation. Innovations in service and product
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design create new utility, usefulness, benefits and production cost reductions that creatively
destroy the “life-cycle” of current standard services, products, and operating procedures
(Schumpeter 1934; Hayek 1978). The resulting service, product, or process differentiation
between the new and the old creates super-profits and, hence, capital by distancing the
innovator from the price competition of the now old, inferior substitutes (Chamberlin 1962;
Porter 1980; Dickson and Ginter 1988; Kim and Mauborgne 2005). The new distinctive
quality, utility or value on the demand side creates wealth and capital on the supply side.
The business discipline most responsible for teaching managers and entrepreneurs about the
service and product development process (within which service and product innovation
occurs) is marketing. Engineering schools have a long tradition of teaching design and
product development, often quite separately from the product development taught in business
schools. Design schools also teach product development from a design perspective. But it is
the discipline of marketing that teaches analyzing demand, the shaping of demand by supply,
the study of old and new user utility, and developing new services and products based on
such insights. However indifferently it may do so, it is marketing and no other business
discipline that is tasked to teach market and consumer research, segmentation, targeting,
positioning, service/product development and its pricing.
Diffusion of innovation actualizes innovation’s wealth creation potential
Another fundamental principle recognized at the birth of modern economics by Adam Smith
(1776) and David Ricardo (1817) is that the trading involved in diffusing innovations creates
exchange surpluses, capital and wealth. Innovations in processes that more efficiently diffuse
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innovations in services and products open up new markets, create new business, more
commerce, more trade, more voluntary exchanges and exchange surpluses that create profits
and capital for sellers and an increase in utility, and well-being for buyers. The combination
of these benefits (apportioned by price) has become known as the general gains from trade
(Mokyr 1990).
The business discipline that is most responsible for the trading processes that diffuse
innovations and for innovation in such trading processes is, again, marketing. Marketing
teaches pioneer selling and other diffusion of innovation (trading) processes such as new
product advertising, usage training, distribution and after-sales service processes. The ways
that a firm’s service/product development process, its supply-chain and customer relationship
management processes can create capital (higher than normal risk adjusted returns on
investment) have been described by Srivastava, Shervani, and Fahey (1999).
Thus, a firm’s two principal line-of-business utility, value, capital and wealth creating
processes are primarily marketing processes. Of course innovations in the processes of
extracting natural resources, in procurement, in manufacturing process costs and quality have
increased profits and capital. Similarly, innovation in management functions and processes
such as finance, accounting, operations, human resource management, IT and business law
that support the firm’s new service/product development process and trading processes can
add to profits and capital but they are, inherently, support process innovations. The primary
source of value, wealth and capital creation are marketing processes.
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Combining the above primacy proposition and ownership proposition (the primacy of
innovation and diffusion of innovation processes in value, wealth and capital creation and
their primary ownership by marketing) leads to the following deduction. The most efficient
division of labor and deployment of human capital and management skill in the firm is the
deployment of the best business process thinkers, designers and implementers in managing
key marketing processes. If this does not occur then the firm is inherently inefficient because
it is deploying inferior thinkers and thinking to improve processes whose potential for
creating value, wealth and capital is greatest.
But deployment of the best process thinkers in the firm to manage marketing processes is not
sufficient. These superior process thinkers must also use their process thinking skills to
identify and focus on improving the key service/product development and diffusion subprocesses (i.e., key marketing activities). If this does not occur, if they use their process
thinking skill improving marketing processes that lead to little productivity or profit
improvement (e.g., price promotion processes) at the expense of improving processes that
could lead to large productivity/profit improvements (e.g., customer service processes), the
top process thinkers and the firm will be less productive. Deploying inferior process thinkers
to manage and improve marketing processes increases the likelihood that the focus will be on
processes they are familiar with, easiest to think about or made most available in their
thinking by business partners (e.g., ad agencies) rather than the processes with the greatest
potential for creating innovation, diffusion of innovation and capital. Superior process
thinkers, by definition, are more likely to see and avoid such traps.
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To repeat, managers immediately responsible for service/product development and diffusion
processes should be the best process thinkers in the firm because in monopolistic-competition
markets (markets where differentiated brands are competing) the greatest potential for
profits, capital and wealth creation comes from such resource deployment. There is a further
complexity argument that can be made for deploying the best process thinkers in the firm to
manage these marketing processes. Marketers have to help design, coordinate and implement
cross-functional service, product and business development processes within the firm and
even more difficult to control boundary spanning, inter-firm exchange and transaction
processes. Boundary spanning managers need to be more visionary and creative in coming up
with process answers to network coordination questions (Burt 2004). Understanding
customer needs/benefits and preferences also requires understanding the procurement,
consumption and production processes of trading partners and different segments of
consumers. All of these marketing processes are very many, varied, broad, complex and hard
to control, therefore requiring superior process thinking to design, coordinate and implement.
Compare these challenges with the business process thinking challenge of engineers
designing and bedding down plant, machinery and manufacturing processes that may be
technologically very complex and very expensive but are operated by system control
algorithms and computers that do a lot of the process quality management. Process thinking
of engineers and operations managers may be very deep and detailed but also very narrow.
Process thinking and the evolving dominant logic in marketing
There are yet further reasons why business process thinking should arouse the curiosity and
interest of marketers, particularly marketing theorists. Vargo and Lusch (2004; 2008)
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emphasize the service relationship with the customer. They define service as the application
of knowledge and skills through deeds and processes. As deeds are acts, acts are actions and
actions are subsumed within processes, process skills and knowledge are the key resources of
the firm (see also Teece, Pisano and Shuen 1997). The ongoing process thinking of the
managers of the firm, combined with the process thinking of partners and customers,
develops the knowledge, competencies, advantage and resources of the firm as well as cocreating service relationship value. Vargo and Lusch (2004) define a dominant logic as an
abstract view that is “never clearly stated but more or less seeps into the individual and
collective mind-set of scientists in a discipline.” (p. 2). The above deduction transforms their
dominant logic into a specific proposition that is entirely consistent with the theme of this
paper: the central paradigmatic constructs in marketing management are (1) knowledge
embodied in business processes, and (2) the process thinking skill that creates such
knowledge. All other resources, competencies, products, physical assets, institutions and
capital are derivative, in that they are created and accumulated through past and present
business processes and the antecedent thinking about these processes.
Several of the commentaries on Vargo and Lusch (2004) further reinforce this conclusion.
Day (2004) cautioned that learning path dependencies create knowledge, expertise and
capabilities and that the resulting entrenched mind-sets and mental-models (i.e., thinking
about what is marketing) may have to be unlearned to switch to the new logic. Very likely
the destruction of old path dependencies and creation of new customer service process
expertise path dependencies will have to be led by senior management elites and not the
current marketing functions of most firms. To extend his caution, as discussed above, such
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change in mind-sets may be beyond the process thinking capabilities of some managers.
Deighton and Narayandas (2004) provide an excellent illustration of superior process
thinking at work in customer service: Siebel’s mapping of its client’s business processes and
the development of information systems controls designed to wrap around these mapped
processes. Gummesson (2004) reinforces the need to design CRM information technology
around the human CRM processes and not vice versa (see also Dickson et al. 2009).
Otherwise the technology will not be used. This surfaces an irony. To be able to introduce
innovative new systems controls that are designed to improve operational processes such as
customer service they must be designed to fit current operational processes. This risks
reinforcing current routines, making future process innovation harder.
The process thinking perspective also subsumes the literature on market-orientation (Kohli
and Jaworski 1990; Kumar et al. 2011), one of the most studied constructs in marketing
management and theory over the last 20 years. Market-orientation, in and of itself, will not
produce service, product and diffusion innovation processes that create utility, profits and
capital. But it surely helps if an organization culture is infused with processes that generate,
disseminate and use superior customer and competitor information. The extent of the help
depends on the cost of such help and whether such help is wasted on unprofitable customers
or unprofitable actions and processes. The quality of the process thinking behind the marketorientation processes that evolve in each unique firm largely determines how marketorientation moderates the profitability of service, product and diffusion innovation processes.
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Discussion
Some practical micro questions and implications
What are the practical implications of the process thinking paradigm for the marketing
discipline? How might it make a substantive contribution to changing marketing practice
rather than, simply be talked about a little, perhaps even a lot and then fade away? One of the
first substantive implications is that the specification of the process thinking skills and
aptitudes of marketing, sales and service employees that lead to creative and clever
adaptations of marketing best practice/process has been largely ignored by marketing
scholarship and this is regrettable. There have been very few articles, if any, published in the
Journal of Marketing on the thinking skills of superior marketers, salespeople or service
managers (cf. Griffin et al. 2009).
The possession of such process thinking skill should be very highly valued, particularly as its
output and logic can be shared and taught across a team, sales force and network of partners.
Whether employed in senior management, marketing, sales or service, the contribution of the
star process improver and thinker in marketing/sales is likely to be much greater than the star
process improver and thinker in, say, finance or accounting where many of these functions’
crucial processes are prescribed by regulation, invariant, and, hence, not subject to either
artificial or market selection.
On the downside, the consequences of not recognizing and rewarding the elite marketing
process marketing thinker who possesses a deep and insightful understanding of the
customers’ consumption/production processes, distribution channel processes, company
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processes and their antecedent supply-chain processes can be substantial, even devastating.
Such persons not listened to or fairly rewarded, yet (given their process thinking skills)
acutely aware of the inferior process thinking of senior managers and their egregious
compensation, are likely to leave the company and launch their own venture. Respected and
trusted for their service and innovative process thinking by their customers, alert to how
modern technology allows them to innovate in their use of supply-chains, skilled in the
virtual management of networks of value-integrating partners, such mavericks and their new
business models (i.e., value and capital creating processes) can wreak havoc, creatively
destroying traditional value-chains, economic organizations and their capital.
Interested parties and sponsors
Consumer researchers have spent several decades studying the thought processes of
consumers in their decision making and consumption. Thousands of articles and conference
papers have been written on the subject. On the supply side, very little research has studied
the process thinking of marketing executives (their on-the-job “complex algorithms of
thought”) in managing the processes they are employed to improve. Given its importance in
determining the supply offering that shapes demand, makes markets and creates capital,
business process thinking skill should surely be a topic that The Marketing Science Institute
might support, even make a research priority. In their reflections on the future of marketing
practice and education a number of ex-directors of MSI emphasized the importance of
adopting a process perspective (Lehmann and Jocz 1996). The next step is a process thinking
perspective. A novel and engaging start would be for MSI to ask its sponsoring organizations
to identify executives who excel in improving innovation and diffusion of innovation
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processes and encourage such experts to become subjects for case study, interviewing and
skill testing. To what do they attribute their skill? Are they more skilled at seeing it in others?
The American Marketing Association might also play a pro-active role in encouraging the
study of the process thinking of different types of marketing professionals. One bold idea
would be to make a requirement of professional membership that members participate in an
on-line marketing management research study. Scholars might bid to draw samples from this
research pool and their bids would be donated to the AMA Foundation. Without a much
better process of getting access to marketing managers and professionals, the experimental
study of the process (or any other) thinking of marketing professionals will remain rare.
Accenture, a major consulting company, emphasizes its skill in rigorously improving the
innovation and diffusion of innovation processes of companies (see accenture.com). What
part of their “vast experience and research” in commercializing innovation includes
identification and measurement of the process thinking skills required in commercializing
innovation? Similarly, in introducing transformational new technology into system control
processes that manage operational added-value processes, technology companies such as
IBM must be constantly wrestling with the process thinking skills that their clients’ managers
are expected to possess in learning and using new systems and services. Consequently, it
might be expected that the IBM Watson labs would have a flourishing process thinking
research program that complements the huge investment IBM makes in advanced cyber
technology research and development. As yet, this is not so, surprising given IBM founder’s
admonishment to his employees to “Think!” and the billions of dollars a year IBM spends on
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its superb global sales and consulting force tasked to change the process thinking of its
clients. Furthermore, it is safe to assume that the designers of IBM’s innovative new services
and products are truly superior (business process) thinkers.
A fruitful stream of research would be to identify managers who are recognized as possessing
superior business process improvement and thinking skills and test whether particular
objective measures of process thinking skill discriminate between them and their more
modestly performing peers. Do they excel at very concrete process thinking tasks or is what
discriminates them skill at more abstract process thinking tasks? If so, such tasks can then be
used to help select and recruit managers for key managerial positions, promotions, mentoring
and special projects. Such selection tools are particularly useful when selection based on onthe-job performance is distorted or confounded by favoritism, nepotism and other personal
attributes (e.g., organization political skills, charm, and physical attractiveness). Perhaps
executive recruiting and training companies might be approached to survey the tasks and
measures they use to identify the process thinking skills of knowledge workers and
collaborative follow-on studies undertaken to comparatively bench-mark test these tools for
their on-the-job predictive and diagnostic value.
Components and antecedents
What are the crucial dimensions of process thinking that determine on-the-job success in
particular in service/product development, brand-management, supply-chain/distribution
management and in pioneer selling? Are concrete skills in process thinking correlated with
higher-order abstract process thinking? Are superior organization process thinkers also better
21
Process Thinking and The Practice of Marketing: Dickson
at thinking about feedback effects, virtuous/vicious circles and market dynamics (Dickson,
Farris and Verbeke 2001)? What parts of the brain are associated with process thinking skill?
How is the brain wired to think about processes? Is it associated with the visualization
centers of the brain, the language processing centers or does it generally light-up the cerebral
cortex? What are the genetic underpinnings of such phenotypical brain activity and thought
structures? Are their cross-cultural differences in process thinking skill and if so why? Does
it have to do with language, child rearing practices, early education, family production
activities or teenage interests and employment? Does process thinking skill improve with age
and peak at a particular age? Are there gender differences in particular process thinking skills
that can be traced to genetic selection? Can the BDT (behavioral decision theory) study of
the bounds and biases in consumer judgments be extended into managerial decision making
and thinking about operational, system-control and learning processes as well as budgeting
and risky resource allocation decision-making? The development and acceptance of validated
process thinking aptitude exercises and scales and the addressing of these questions will take
many years of research by many scholars but, however daunting the challenge of starting
from scratch, the sooner such research is started and shared, the sooner marketing scholars,
teachers and practitioners will have results and a community of interested, encouraging
colleagues to share them with.
Implications for marketing education
How might marketing education respond to the process thinking paradigm? For starters, it
could require a course in economic history that gets students thinking about the why, when
and where of the global evolution of marketing processes and its product (that is, markets,
22
Process Thinking and The Practice of Marketing: Dickson
wealth, and prosperity.) Inspiring biographies of outstanding thinkers in service/product
innovation and its diffusion (such as Cyrus McCormick) might be added to such course
readings. This might be followed by a service and product innovation process thinking course
that trains marketing, design and engineering students to take the Product Development and
Management Association New Product Development Professional Certification exam. This
course would also include the teaching of cases that study the development and launching of
truly innovative services and products. The lack of such case studies speaks to the marketing
discipline’s education priorities. A solution would be the formation of a coalition of some 50
large State business schools that would contribute $5,000 each to create an annual prize pool
that would produce at least five high quality commercialization of innovation cases a year.
The schools would have free use of the cases for their undergraduate and graduate teaching
and would share the royalties from sales to other design, engineering and business schools
with the authors.
The discipline also needs cases, sponsored by innovators such as Salesforce.com, that
challenge students to think about how to introduce inexpensive, innovative system-controls
and algorithms into small and large businesses that monitor customer relationships, customer
satisfaction and customer profitability and that seamlessly integrate these systems into
adapted selling and customer service processes (Dickson et al. 2009). More generally, how
can innovative process thinking be encouraged in the class room and in project work? The
“brass ring” business school educators reach for is to teach their students to think. But what
does that mean? What does critical thinking and thinking outside the box mean in a world of
managing business processes? It may require focusing on teaching only elite students how to
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Process Thinking and The Practice of Marketing: Dickson
think about developing innovative services/products and diffusing them. Inferior process
thinkers can, by one means or another, significantly slow and even undermine the learning of
the elite. Egalitarians who reject the need for such an elitist approach might ponder the irony
of a discipline that quite ruthlessly uses tenure to winnow its professors and is prepared to
pay significant premiums to its chaired professors compared to its part-time adjuncts, yet
does not similarly winnow and segment its students. They might also re-read the above
arguments about the centrality of process thinking skill in biological and economic evolution.
The fact that there is significant variation in process thinking aptitude and that the very best
process thinkers need to lead process improvement in economic organizations, particularly in
their commercialization of innovation, cannot be disputed. What is in dispute is what
marketing education should do about it and will do about it? The quality of response to all of
these suggestions, issues, questions and challenges depends, itself, on superior process
thinking in the conception and implementation of solutions…that is, superior marketing
educator process thinking. It also depends on a steely single-mindedness to move from talk to
walk (behavior), a shift from egalitarianism to elitism in marketing education, and a zeitgeist
(spirit) of optimism, enthusiasm and aggressive activism rather than pessimism, anomie and
passive conservatism.
Some further macro questions and implications
If it is observed in multi-method empirical research that the best process thinkers in firms are
not actively managing and improving the firms’ service/product development and diffusion
processes, and further that the enterprise has no history of such resource deployment, then is
this evidence of structural economic inefficiency? On the face of it, yes. There are many
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Process Thinking and The Practice of Marketing: Dickson
other contentious corollary questions and answers. Why is process thinking aptitude not
directly measured in business school admissions and in graduate recruiting? Why are
surrogates such as mathematical or verbal skill used instead? Is this an example of looking
for the car keys under the convenient street light?
What if marketing students and teachers are not the best process thinkers in business schools?
A Remington et al. (2000) replication of a 1985 study found that marketing majors possessed
weak quantitative skills and nothing had changed over the previous 25 years. Marketing
undergraduates are, on average, the weakest business school students on a number of
different aptitude measures (Aggarwal, Vaidyanathan, & Rochford, 2007), in part because
marketing has been perceived to be easy and a default major for the weakest business school
students (LaBarbera & Simonoff, 1999; Lamont & Friedman, 1997). The priors are low that
the process thinking of marketing majors is superior to other business majors. This
expectation reinforces the above argument for focusing resources and commercialization of
innovation courses on elite process thinkers.
What if the teaching of service/product innovation and diffusion of innovation processes are
not given pre-eminence in business school education? Is the channeling of business school
resources into teaching and research that are supportive but peripheral to the most important
capital creating processes of the firm (and the most important wealth creating processes for a
country) evidence of the systemic failure of business schools to fulfill their Hobbesian social
contract? The Hobbesian social contract is that in return for all the economic and status
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Process Thinking and The Practice of Marketing: Dickson
benefits business schools receive from society they in turn must strive to use their
accumulated resources and capabilities to serve society as well as they can.
The defense that business schools and their students are responding to demand, and “the
market” demands and values finance, accounting and other functional specialists over
marketing graduates reveals a level of simple-minded, even specious thinking about the
evolution of supply and demand that, in-itself, is very disquieting. Markets cannot select on
what has never been supplied. Demand for different business majors is subject to exogenous
factors such as economic downturns but it is largely endogenous, coevolving with business
school supply. It is the product of institutionalized path dependencies between the
knowledge, competencies and capabilities accumulated by business schools over time and
their alumni, industry networks and professional associations. The demand for superior
process thinkers trained mostly by clinical teachers experienced in commercializing and
diffusing innovation that created business development, new jobs and capital has never been
tested because it has never been supplied. Do today’s business school marketing departments
focus on the rigorous teaching of commercialization of innovation through service/product
development, supply-chain management, market-making pioneer selling and other highproductivity diffusion of innovation practices to elite process thinkers?
To heed Peter Drucker’s 20-year old warning (the west must possess superior knowledge
workers) might a first step be to recognize, that with a few maverick exceptions, the west has
its business education priorities wrong and needs to get them right? A second step would be
for western business education to explain why their knowledge-worker training purports to
26
Process Thinking and The Practice of Marketing: Dickson
teach students how to think and best practices/processes, yet uses abstract, esoteric economic
and management science paradigms that do not study knowledge worker process thinking
aptitude and process improvement skill? A third step might be to audit and assess the
strategies western business schools have developed and the resources they have deployed to
ensure that the knowledge workers they train to commercialize and diffuse innovations will
be both western and superior? Or have business schools placed themselves above such a
national responsibility and if so, why?
And what if Peter Drucker’s warning is ignored? What if western education, political and
business leaders continue to exhibit the complacency and hubris implied in the following
assessment by Jack and Suzy Welch, “It will take years of venture capital flowing in before
the Chinese let go of a rote approach to work and truly embrace entrepreneurial innovation”
(BusinessWeek, July 2, 2007, p. 112). Will the political and entrepreneurial business
leadership in Factory-China, in turn, reject the rote approach of western business school
education to teaching and scholarship? What if, unencumbered by the organization, course,
theory and career-incentive path dependencies that entrap western business school routines
and process thinking, a new type of elite business school evolves in progressive and more
open-minded emerging economies that focuses on service/product development processes,
diffusion of innovation processes and business process improvement thinking skill? Would
such business schools become the magnets, catalysts, triggers and accelerators of an
innovation system-dynamic in these economies similar to that created by the agricultural
colleges in the great American land grant universities 100 years ago?
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Process Thinking and The Practice of Marketing: Dickson
Forget its manipulation of its currency. For the west, a far more threatening, low-risk, highreturn, geo-political strategy that the next generation of Chinese leadership could pursue
would be to heavily invest in creating a dozen exemplar Design/Engineering/Business
schools that over the next 50 years replicate themselves across China. These schools would
be populated (on the ground and virtually) by the very best paid innovation and diffusion of
innovation teachers and business process thinkers from around the world and, increasingly,
within China. The schools would be attended by students from the Chinese economic and
political elites who score highest on validated measures of process thinking skill.
If well led, such process creativity hothouses would reformulate themselves around superior
learning and training processes that would be continually improved. Free of unsubstantiated
historical prejudices about the creativity of the Chinese mind, liberated from the expense and
distractions of western business school research values and routines, they would invest their
research resources in understanding and improving the practical domestic and global
commercialization of innovation perhaps by industries and markets as the German trade
universities so successfully did in the late 19th century. They could create a class of young
knowledge workers, who in their focused training, skills, motivation and cost would be scary
superior to the west’s best and brightest knowledge workers.
And which business education model would India and other emerging low labor-cost
economies follow? A model dominated by finance and the (d)efficient market hypothesis, or
a model dominated by marketing and the innovation process thinking paradigm? The Boston
Consulting Group’s 2010 survey of most innovative companies revealed the number of
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Process Thinking and The Practice of Marketing: Dickson
Indian companies on the list is increasing, the number of American companies is decreasing
and that Indian firms value innovation more than American firms. Indian firms have also
invented a new sort “Ghandian” innovation where a service or product is redesigned and
marketed at 20% of the American price (Schumpeter 2010). If Indian business schools follow
the lead of such Indian firms there is no question which model they will choose.
Whether or not any or all of the above happens, will business process thinking superiority
directed at commercializing innovation become the arms race of the 21st Century? This
question we can also answer with some certainty. No, it will not become so. It has been so
ever since the gains from trading replaced the gains from raiding as the primary way of
acquiring wealth and power.
Conclusion
That the quality of the thinking of managers matters is hardly a revelation. That the quality of
the process thinking aptitude and skill of managers matters is an insight. That the process
thinking aptitude and skill of elite marketers, sales and service people matters as much as this
paper concludes may seem preposterous, doubted by many, including marketers themselves.
One reason for this is that the marketing discipline has focused almost exclusively on
researching and teaching consumer thinking and the latest marketing technology “apps”
rather than researching and teaching about the process thinking behind marketers’ choice,
improvement and implementation of marketing processes and practices.
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Process Thinking and The Practice of Marketing: Dickson
Using multiple theories, probing questions and several provocative scenarios it is concluded
that if the marketing discipline remains disinterested in the study of the process thinking
aptitude of its members then it is not because the topic is unimportant. For consumers,
marketers, business enterprises, markets, economies, nation states, humanity at large, and
even our plundered and increasingly polluted planet, each and all of their futures vitally
depend on innovation, and innovation in the diffusion of innovations…and the process
thinking and improvement skills of the managers, primarily marketers, who will make such
innovation and diffusion of innovation happen.
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Process Thinking and The Practice of Marketing: Dickson
Appendix
Measuring Process Thinking
________________________________________________________________
Processthinking.org is a web site where you can take a battery of process thinking exercises
and compare your process thinking abilities with the performance of others. After completing
the exercises you will have an operational understanding of what process thinking is about
and whether you yourself have special process thinking abilities, as measured by the tasks.
The following list describes the seven dimensions of process thinking that are measured by
the battery and you will be scored on:
1. Your ability to remember to do something.
2. Your ability to learn several abstract processes presented by the computer.
3. How available is a production process in your working memory (measured by response
latency) and how accurate is your memory of the process.
4. Your process thinking creative problem solving ability.
5. Your ability to map a process and ability to analyze and interpret the process map to make
it more efficient.
6. Your ability to understand flows of product along a supply-chain.
7. Your higher-order process thinking ability. Your ability to understand the quality
improvement process versus the rework process and the importance of learning from
experience. Your ability to understand and “see” higher-order quality-improvement
learning processes. Your ability to learn an abstract process thinking theory process.
The following is an illustrative set of self-reported business process thinking statements
drawn from Dickson et al (2010):
1=extremely uncharacteristic of you (not at all like you)
2=somewhat uncharacteristic
3=uncertain
4=somewhat characteristic
5=extremely characteristic of you (very much like you).
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
I am very good at finding where the problems are in a work process.
I am very good at understanding the logic underlying a work process.
I am very good at thinking of better ways of doing things at work
I am able to quickly understand complex processes at work.
I am very creative and out-of-the box in my thinking about how to do things at work.
I am very good at simplifying a work process (a way of doing something).
I am very good at coming up with new solutions to work process problems.
I am very good at work process improvement.
I am very good at thinking about how one task in a work process affects future tasks.
I am very good at designing work processes.
I am very good at making work processes more efficient.
I am very good at making work processes very reliable.
___________________________________________________________________________
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Process Thinking and The Practice of Marketing: Dickson
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