Essential Scholarly Exchange

Abstract
Who killed the intellectual creativity of the ANZMAC papers? In a world of academic
thought espousing academic freedom, intellectual endeavour and the pursuit of new academic
thought, the ANZMAC conference paper lies dying from near terminal wounds. Was there a
murder? An accident? Or have old age and clogged reviewing arteries finally taken their toll?
In 200 words, this dramatic summary of the Essential Scholarly Exchange attempts the best of
academic practice and the worst of advertising excess. As the only printed item you'll read
before the conference, this abstract must inform (the paper is critical of the ANZMAC
process), persuade (Please come to my session) and summarise the paper (Marketing theory
used. Paper lengths criticised). At best, the abstract attempts to convey the plot of essential
scholarly exchange in less words than a film review. At worst, it's 200 words summarising the
criticism that struggled to stay inside the perversely arbitrary page restriction. The paper
covers issues of the impact of 5 page long papers on marketing in single line space, and
within 2.5 centimetre boundaries. Proposals for reforming the ANZMAC paper process will
be suggested, and the word length exceed just before the paper gets to the interesting part.

Introduction
In a world of publish or perish, this paper may give the author the notoriety of publishing and
perishing in the same movement. The paper's nature is serious, the content important and the
style sarcastic, academic and whimsical. The arguments raised debate the unspoken and
agreed assumptions tied to the paper length and submission requirements for papers at
ANZMAC. In challenging these decisions, the author accepts the risks associated with such
criticism, but feels the discourse is needed to "keep the system honest" (to paraphrase the
Democrats), and to at least speak some of the unspoken assumptions out loud.

ANZMAC: The Intellectual Playground or Serious Philosophers Club?

The annual Australian and New Zealand Marketing shindig has usually been the highpoint of
the marketing academic's calendar. It caps off the conference season, and for many marketers
(particularly those from my school), it represents a chance to catch up with colleagues (not
seen since last ANZMAC), and finish the academic year in style, comfort and intellectual
pursuit. With our teaching behind us (sparing those summer semester classes), and five
months of preparation from submission to presentation, ANZMAC has been a highlight of the
marketing conference circuit.

I don't think you understand the seriousness of the situation, Mr Bond

Marketing is an intensely serious discipline. This is why we have an intensely serious
conference which does not permit the use of clever titles, plays on words, and exactly the
same techniques we teach in advertising. If Rust and Oliver (1994) complained about lifeless
advertising, they should be spared the lifeless promotion of ANZMAC articles.
To quote the ANZMAC guidelines…
"Authors should provide a title which comprises as few words as possible, in order to
convey the academic focus of the paper clearly. Authors should not attempt to create a
“clever” title, such as a “play on words”, or use other irrelevant or trivial words in the
 title. The ANZMAC conference is essentially a scholarly exchange." (ANZMAC
2002)
Trivial words are a pursuit for some academic writers, namely those who happen to hold
established positions, post essays to El-Mar, or seek publication in the European Journal of
Marketing's special editions on post-modernism. Holbrook (1997) argued that we "have
greater lessons to learn from our cats than from LISREL manuals or from our copies of the
marketing principles textbooks’’, yet the ethology of a cat would scarcely be described as
serious paper despite having been cited by Arias and Acebron (2001). Sports sponsorship
authors Amis, Slack and Berret (1999) quote "We sell insulation which is a boring product, so
we try to communicate with our market place with some warmth and wit and charm.". May it
be that LISREL is a boring product, and communicating with clever titles and plays on words
are our methods of warmth, wit and charm? Admittedly, Huang (1998) did argue the point of
humour in advertising wasn't always effective, and is not always appropriate for every market.
True, and in marketing conferences, not everyone possesses a desire for sharp wit and fanciful
wordplay as a title for their session. Although, culturally, there may even be a need to
embrace the use of humour and word play as part of the Celtic tradition of marketing. Aherne
(2000) argues the case of William Yeats as a culturally specific marketer, who features
heavily in the Celtic marketing discourse. For Aherne, Celtic marketing contained an
important instruction in that…
"Consumers are won and their hearts are captured, not by supine abnegation or slavish
adulation, but by quick wit, good humour, tall tale telling, laid-back banter, down-to-
earth ribaldry and happy-go-lucky flirtatiousness. This make-em-laugh model,
admittedly, is contrary to the modern marketing mindset, which can only be described
as a contemporary manifestation of courtly love".
Whilst ANZMAC may not be the ground for courting and love, it certain can be argued that
the Celtic marketer's desire for a clever play of words in their title and abstract is a cultural
heritage to be supported, and not denied to these traditional Celtic marketers. It also happens
to be that marketers understand the need for the headline of a sales pitch to catch the eye and
mind of the reader, to drive them to the body (abstract) of the pitch.

Driven to Abstraction: 200 words of a sales pitch for my session

"Authors should note that the abstract is the only printed text the delegates will see.
The full content of conference papers will appear in a conference CD-ROM given to
all delegates as part of their conference pack, and available for commercial sale to the
general public"
"Authors should give very careful thought to the writing of their abstract. It should not
list section headings from the main paper - rather, it should summarise the entire
paper, including the findings and conclusions. The abstract should be no longer than
200 words." (ANZMAC 2002)

The author wishes to convey the concern of many marketing academics when they argue that
substance should dominate over style in the pursuit of academic work. However, with 200
words and less, and with an average reading speed (taken from college students) of around
250-300 words a minute, there is scarcely time to hold the reader. From title to abstract, the
average academic audience member will take less than a minute (and probably closer to 30
seconds) to decide whether to attend the presentation, or read the paper (Virginia Tech, 2002).

The concern for ANZMAC executives is not whether the abstract is simply a summary of
headings, but whether it forms a sales pitch for the author's presentation. The abstract to this
paper was written with one eye on the word count, and another on filling the room for the
session. Of course, every author at ANZMAC is simply concerned with promoting the best
practice of marketing (which is why every reader should have attended my session), and the
abstract is the best method to gain that audience. That, and the fact that we can have longer
PowerPoint presentations than we do conference papers indicates that substance is most easily
delivered by bullet point form.

Intellectual Anorexia: Shrinking the Paper Length

ANZMAC's intellectual weight loss regime apparently began in 1999, when paper lengths
dropped from the relatively open length of approximately 4000 to 6000 words (as evidence by
the conference proceedings on the ANZMAC.org website), to a reduced length closer to 3000
to 5000. By 2000, the policy of the ANZMAC submission had formalised the reduction of
the paper length to 5 pages, and effectively locked the current word length into place. The
decline is illustrated in Table 1 (there goes 7 lines of text)
Table 1. ANZMAC Page Lengths
ANZMAC Date Length
2002 5 pages
2001 5 pages
2000 5 pages
1999 7-8 pages
1998 12 -16 pages
(This table excludes the period prior to ANZMAC's formation (ANZMA & ANZMEC))

Comparative Standards: World's Best Paper Lengths

How then does ANZMAC's short page length compare against world practice? It seems
reasonable to assume that ANZMAC's requirements would be comparable those of collegiate
groups and similar conferences in the international arena. The comparison is illustrated in a
space consuming table that just cost this paper another 70 words.

Table 2. Paper Lengths and Breadth (Another 5 lines gone)

Conference Pages Words Font Size Spacing
ANZMAC 5 ~2500 12pt Times New Roman Single
EMAC 6 ~2500 12pt Times New Roman Single
ANZAM 10 ~7000 11pt Times New Roman Single
Academy of 15-20 4000-6000 12pt Times New Roman Double
Marketing
ACR 20 6000 words 12pt Times New Roman Double
Macromarketing 20 6000 words 12pt Times New Roman Double

With the exception of EMAC, the established word length for an international conference
appears to hover at the top end of 6000 words. ANZMAC's anorexia is highlighted by
comparison to the size of the largest conference, Advances in Consumer Research (ACR),
which still produces fully printed conference proceedings. In effect, ANZMAC is the
smallest of the marketing academic conferences on offer. It also presents a cause for concern
for marketing academics - the major academic think tank of Australian marketing only offers
half to a third of the room for intellectual endeavour found at international conferences (or
even a local event held in the days following ANZMAC)
To further complicate the matter, strict formatting requirements of double carriage returns
before a major heading, and single carriage return after it certainly discourages the use of
more than two sections. A loss of six lines in five page document is a serious waste of nearly
80 words, or a reasonably sized table. Perhaps this is the intention - to create single idea
papers that rely on long flowing essay style delivery, rather than the heading-subheading style
taught to our students.

Pragmatism in the Age of Government Funding

In an age where careers are made and lost over what amounts to academic bounty hunting
(publishing and not perishing), it would be naïve to believe that a conference such as
ANZMAC is not a target of those Australian academics wishing a fast DEST point (or two).
To qualify as a DEST conference, the papers must be peer reviewed by a body of reviewers
which was independent of the conference editorial board. With ANZMAC 2000 producing
288 papers, and ANZMAC 2001 producing 268 papers, it can be safely assumed the
organising committee needs to find reviewers for the 270 odd conference papers. It can also
be safely assumed, that there aren't 269 reviewers available for each paper, either through
multiple submissions from the same author teams, or by the nature of academia being an
exceptionally busy profession. The author admits to submitting multiple conference papers,
and is aware of the pressure on conference organisers to either restrict multiple submission, or
limit the reviewer workload.

In order to combat the pressures on the review system, conference organisers are faced with a
range of alternatives - such as capping the number of submissions, reducing the overall length
of papers, or confining themselves to a quota structure. With 20 different streams, it is no
longer feasible to even begin to coordinate a team of academics to see every paper being
presented (there are more streams than members of my department). With the pressures of
the quantity of research, and the volume of academics, something had to give way.
Unfortunately, to this author, it appears that I have returned to find not only the baby and the
bath water missing, but someone appears to have thrown the bath away for good measure as
well. The quality standards of the papers submitted to ANZMAC have no choice but to suffer
at the hands of the reduced paper length. Even the use of a word count would decrease the
pressure on the author - the decision to use a table to illustrate data is not to be taken lightly.
The review of comparative conference paper lengths in tabular form hurt the space quota
badly. Even my choice of referencing has been limited to the volume I can afford to spend on
citing other's opinions and justifying my work. Admittedly, the reference list is a separate
page, but the pressure to create space to report results will have to come at the expense of
literature reviews.

Conclusions, Recommendations and Trivial Words in the Title

This paper is doomed. The author freely admits that a five page treatise criticising the Call
for Papers and Submission details is a sub optimal way to get a conference paper accepted or
published. That said, the complaint is not with the ANZMAC executive, but with the
mechanisms of our own intellectual diet regime. The marketing calorie count is down, the
papers are thinner not leaner, and the dizzying heights of intellectual debate have been
replaced by a vertigo from low academic blood sugar levels. We run the risk of starving the
very organisation we seem to be trying to save. But as the author has often taught students - if
you want to make a complaint, be prepared to make a suggestion. And in conclusion, three
suggestions come to the fore:

First, expand the length of the paper to a word length, and not a page length. Page lengths
make sense in the context of a finite printed volume, where pages equal dollars, and dollars
equal trees. The environment is no longer in fear of the verbal outpouring of a range of
marketing scholars all the time ANZMAC continues with the production of the conference
proceedings CD. Particularly since the 2001 CD consisted of a total of 21.1mb, indicating that
an additional 31 conference proceedings could be published to the same disk. Each author
could produce approximately 150 pages for their paper, and still have room for the conference
timetable.

Second, stream the papers by size or length. Academics who are satisfied with their work at
the 5 page mark can continue to receive the same DEST points for their paper, and would be
expected to receive and review a paper of equal length. Those authors (myself included) who
wished to 'upsize' to 6-10 pages also have the option to submit a large paper of equal merit.
In return for the extra legroom will be the responsibility for reviewing a longer work (or
perhaps 2 smaller works). All that would be needed is a simple process of tagging conference
submission with "Regular" or "Large"

Third, excessive verbiage under the heading 'food for thought' is preferable to starving.
ANZMAC stands alone in the market place of academic thought as a proving ground for
young academics, a meeting place for industry veterans, and a hotbed of new marketing
thought. As an academic environment, it has the seriousness and the rigour of necessary for a
credible academic industry conference. However, without allowing the authors presenting to
go into any significant depth in their written thought, it risks undermining that credibility. A
whimsical slogan on a journal title, and a quirky play on words in an abstract is the sign of a
marketing industry. We teach creativity to our students in marketing communications
projects, we critique advertising messages on their capacity to deliver short, sharp and
memorable messages. Then we write titles of academic focus in as few words as possible. Set
a challenge for the submitters - the best conference title in 25 words or less. If you can win a
car from packet of cornflakes, surely marketing conferences are the ideal place to demonstrate
that type of short, sharp marketing communications skill?

In the end, marketing academia will continue, this conference paper will sit on a CD, and the
academic world will continue to publish (lest we perish), review papers and once yearly
gather under the banner of ANZMAC. It represents a criticism of the arbitrary limits placed
on the propagation of new ideas, and a system that allows undergraduate assignments to have
a greater word length than the professional works of the lecturers. The purpose of the paper
was little more than to produce five pages of commentary on the requirements of five page
articles, and for that, it may yet earn the author a DEST point - assuming it does not exceed
the page limit and be automatically excluded.

Final Thoughts

For the sake of brevity, these have not been discussed (Krisjanous, 2001; Buber, 2000; Dann
2000; Fausnaugh and Lye, 2000; Pollard, Pitt, Ewing and Bruwer, 2000)

"The maximum length of Competitive Papers is five pages (inclusive of all figures, tables,
technical appendices, etc.), plus the pages required to list the references."
 References

Aherne, A. (2000) " Chronicles of the Celtic Marketing Circle, Part I: The Paradise
Parchment" Marketing Intelligence &
Planning, 18,6/7 400-413

Amis, J., Slack, T. and Berrett, T: (1999) “Sport sponsorship as distinctive competence”,
European Journal of Marketing, 33, Issue 34, 14-25.

ANZMAC (2002) " ANZMAC 2002 Electronic Submission Requirements" ,

http://www.deakin.edu.au/anzmac/submission.htm

Arias, J. and Acebron, L. (2001). " Postmodern approaches in

business-to-business marketing and marketing research" Journal of Business and Industrial
Marketing,16 (1) 7-20.

Buber, R.(2000) " Model Building on Internal Marketing. An Exploratory Study By GABEK"
ANZMAC Conference Proceedings, 143-147

Dann, S. (2000) " Green Eggs and Market Plans: Learning Marketing from Dr Seuss"
ANZMAC Conference Proceedings, 230-235.

Fausnaugh, C. and Lye, A. (2000) " Trust Emergence in Business to Business Relationships",
ANZMAC Conference Proceedings, 230-235.

Holbrook, M. (1997), ``Feline consumption. Ethography, felologies and unobtrusive

participation in the life of a cat'', European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 31 No. 3/4, pp. 214-33.

Huang, M (1998) "Exploring a new typology of advertising appeals: basic, versus social,
emotional advertising in a global setting." International Journal of Advertising, 17(2) p145-
169

Krisjanous, J, (2001) " The E-Health Consumer and the Impact on Consumer-Health Provider
Relationships" ANZMAC Conference Proceedings
Pollard, L., Pitt, L., Ewing, M. and Bruwer, J. (2000) " An Evaluation Of Australian Online
Sports Betting Sites Using Correspondence Analysis" ANZMAC Conference Proceedings,
990-994.

Rust, R.T. and Oliver, R.W. (1994), “Notes and comments: the death of advertising”, Journal
of Advertising, Vol. 23 No. 4, December, pp. 71-7.

Virginia Tech (2002) "Suggestions for improving reading speed"

http://www.ucc.vt.edu/stdysk/suggest.html