Friends With Benefits: Practitioner Publishing as a Pathway to Collaboration in Social Marketing

Four years ago, the late Dr. Susan Kirby wrote an editorial for Social Marketing Quarterly (SMQ) entitled “Social Marketing Practitioners: Should you share your work in SMQ?” (Kirby, 2019). Spoiler alert—the answer was a resounding “yes,” as she noted her focus in becoming associate editor for the journal was “to advocate for practitioners, their viewpoints, their needs, and ways to engage them more fully in the journal” (p. 179). Upon her passing soon after the piece was published, Susan’s friends and colleagues described her devotion to social marketing and her passion for supporting practitioners (Jordan et al., 2020). In her editorial, Susan emphasized that throughout her career, her goal had been to “engage practitioners in using better and more science and research in their social marketing practice” (p. 179). She linked practitioner publishing to this goal, essentially pointing out that if practitioners don’t publish their work, how will others be able to conduct effective formative literature research and avoid reinventing the wheel? She went on to detail how she and SMQ planned to encourage practitioners to publish, including surveys to readers of SMQ to find out the needs of practitioners, a mentoring webinar, shortened review timeframes for article submissions, and developing a co-creation model to bring academics and practitioners together. Some of these actions have happened (such as the readership survey and webinar), and some are still in the works with the current editorial team committed to carrying on Susan’s work (McDivitt, 2020). Why do we think the work Susan started is so important? Practitioners publishing in journals like SMQ play an important part in bringing the academic world and practitioners closer together, or “closing the academic/practitioner gap” as many have called it (Gray et al., 2011; Tapp, 2004; Tucker & Lowe, 2014; to name but a few). From a literature review that we’ve conducted, the conversation appears to be somewhat missing in social marketing circles. So what is the academic/practitioner gap? It’s been defined as a “large gap between science and practice” and has gone under the various guises of the science/practice gap, academic/practitioner