Tips for Writing a PhD in Marketing
Usually, postgraduate students find doctoral programmes in Marketing more challenging due to the need to conduct extensive research among customer audiences. These projects are also characterised by the need to identify and formulate complex topics and research questions that are relevant, unique, and significant for multiple stakeholders including buyers, companies, and industry regulators. Even experienced thesis writing professionals frequently struggle with PhD thesis writing in this sphere due to the rapidly changing macro-environment and the difficulty of finding interesting and understudied areas for research. We have asked our experts to share some tips / tactics in this sphere to help you with your PhD thesis writing in the sphere of Marketing.
Tips for Writing a PhD in Marketing
Find the Right Tutor
A PhD project completion is very similar to training for the Olympics. While you will be contributing a lot of your resources and efforts to your future victory, a good coach can largely determine whether they will lead to success or failure. When you start looking for the right tutor, try to focus on the following aspects:
- Do they have a lot of experience in Marketing?
- Have they supervised any PhD theses in this sphere in the past?
- Do they have sufficient time to invest in your project in the following several years?
In many situations, a good tutor with a genuine interest in your PhD project is preferable to a top-grade one with a lot of personal obligations and projects requiring their attention.
Develop a Strong Topic
In addition to consulting with your tutor, you should also consider doing some primary research or using professional PhD writing services to help you with your topic and research objectives. The reason why this is important is associated with the obsolescence problem. A dissertation exploring the problems of offline retailers started in 2020 can be viewed as largely irrelevant in 2022-2023 due to the COVID-19 and the global shift towards online deliveries. While such disruptive trends cannot be predicted, it may be wise to identify and monitor all potential hindrances that may emerge in the future. Another widespread problem is topic uniqueness. If competing projects exploring the same phenomenon get published one or two years prior to the completion of your dissertation, this will adversely affect its novelty and academic relevance. Hence, finding the right topic and formulating realistic and actionable research objectives can be half the battle when writing a PhD in Marketing.
Write a Convincing Proposal
In most cases, your PhD proposal needs to describe your future project topic and details, outline your research objectives and questions, and provide a brief literature review and proposed methodology. Finalising this document prior to searching for the best university and tutor may be preferable in the case of Marketing theses due to the following reasons:
- The completion of a PhD proposal gives you a better understanding of your future work and potential hindrances associated with its completion.
- Many tutors can get interested in your project if you demonstrate autonomy and independence by proposing your own research topic and thesis plan straight away.
- You can submit your proposals to multiple universities and get valuable criticisms even if some of them decline your admission requests.
Find the Right Organisation or Population Sample
The second most important aspect of writing your PhD in Marketing is selecting the optimal way to address your research objectives. Some postgraduate students choose to work with specific organisations they have access to. This path is easier in certain aspects since you can conduct longitudinal data analysis, collect sufficient data samples, and work with the expressed consent of the company you cooperate with. Another option here is to use consumer data, which is inevitable if your Marketing PhD explores consumer psychology, services marketing, advertising effectiveness or other topics that cannot be fully appraised from the organisational perspective. Whatever your choice, make sure that you have continued access to this source of quality information at all times during the completion of your PhD project.