Are those comments on the manuscript, or on something else? Like Gene Siskel reviewing a movie based on the script that he felt should have been written, comments often include all sorts of strange and irrelevant notes. Did they read my paper?

They criticize your failure to address points that you did address. They might dislike your conclusions, while not stating why they might be in error.  "It is an interesting study," the comments might note, "but you did not cite Ira Levent's wonderful paper," though it is sometimes not clear how that paper would have influenced the research conceptualization. Others might say they "don't like" the numbers you found, that you didn't use the hot statistic of the month, or that the survey did not use the reviewer's favorite method. (I had one paper rejected with a note that "[My] research topic is advertising, not marketing.")

The effects of this process are seen in many papers. A co-researcher once gave me a poorly written text chapter that he wanted included in the references. Though possessing (at best) the most oblique relevance to our study, he feared that the author might end up as a journal referee. The author of a frequently cited research book once lamented that a fraction of the citations to his book also include discussion indicating the researcher read and understood what the book said.

Reviewers and colleagues often comment on the research they would like to do, not what you did. A faculty member must often use a department-desired research "method" (as defined by senior faculty) or forgo any hopes of ever being supported for tenure or promotion at the university, even if that method is not useful or relevant to answering the questions raised in a particular area of inquiry.

Everyone seems to dislike some research, even finding fault with studies that have passed the rigors of journal referees. Basic buyer behavior theory indicates this is logical, since few studies aim at everyone's interests. In such a diverse field, no one could possibly claim to be interested in every area of marketing research. No one reads everything. I have never met anyone who claimed to read every issue of Journal of Marketing from cover-to-cover.   But few base their criticisms of research on a lack of interest in the topic. Instead, they seem to say that "The research is not pure enough for me."   As a result, the often-repeated complaint is that the bulk of marketing research is irrelevant. Relevance can mean all sorts of things, but all faculty feel they are qualified to judge all journals articles' "value."

And that is the heart of the problem. Instead of reveling in the diversity of our discipline, faculty disparage the ideas they do not understand. Differing opinions are condemned as "bad" with the fervor of two protester groups clashing in front of an abortion clinic.

Maybe marketing research suffers not from irrelevance, but ethnocentrism. In many instances, the researchers are themselves quite narrow: pedantic and shallow arguments over the proper "method" sometimes replaces answering whether an inquiry can add insight to a broad range of marketing issues. Methods and statistical skills replace conceptual analysis.

In the beginning (i.e. at the start of academic marketing research efforts, back before the glacier melted), marketing research was inter-disciplinary, with scholars and researchers coming from a variety of fields. But, over time, that has changed. Today, many (most?) researchers have studied marketing as a narrow specialized field. I hear people are now concerned about the "purity" of the field, as they oppose research by people trained in non-business disciplines, such as psychology or communications.

In other words, many scholars often bog down in discussion of the "proper methods" for all research, instead of trying to apply the plethora of perspectives from different disciplines to answer important and pressing questions.  For many reviewers, the nature of the research questions becomes secondary to presenting the all-important value of a particular research approach they wish to encourage. Instead, their comments are a virtual brochure on a favored research method or approach to data analysis.

A friend in another department once told me that he just tries to publish articles that help make him famous. Some colleagues (or journal referees) might dislike his research saying "It's not what I would do," but he just wants to generate discussions of ideas. It will help make him famous.  "For promotion, my senior faculty insist they must like the research," he once complained. "But my publications will not make me famous with them. They already know me."

In the end, to get the research manuscript published, we change the verbs and alter the writing style, include a few gratuitous citations the reviewers requested. We write, revise, alter and edit -- though the research is long done (and not to be altered), we try to meet the editorial demands of the referees so the paper will be published. And, if we successfully go through the process, we eventually see a set of page proofs showing the manuscript that will appear in the journal.

Only then we realize that the paper was copy edited to meet the whims of style of somebody else. After all that rewriting, we might not even recognize the final article.