In It For The Long Run

Written by Marie Brand, PhD Candidate at WU Vienna

How many people do you know who have placed in the top 20 in a marathon, including professional runners? Before chatting with Femke van Horen, Professor of Consumer Behavior at the Marketing Department of Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam, I would have said zero. But Femke, who runs regularly, has run a marathon where she placed 17th in her age group and that included two short breaks, so in her own words she “could have gone faster”. Finishing a marathon is no small feat and besides being a personal triumph, it has a lot in common with building a career in academia. Both require dedication and perseverance, building stamina and resilience along the way. And like any distance runner, Femke will tell you that a marathon isn’t won in a single stride. It’s a long game, built step by step. Standing to give her inaugural address marking her professorship at VU Amsterdam this January, Femke had a chance to look back at the many steps of her academic career.

Many steps, one route

Femke started her career as a consumer behavior researcher in an interdisciplinary institute, combining marketing, social psychology, and behavioral economics. Trained as a social psychologist, she was used to studying psychological processes but was increasingly drawn to applied phenomena. In her early work, she focused on copycat product imitations.

“When I started working on product imitation, I thought: this is such a marketing topic. Not really what I was used to studying as a social psychologist. But after a while it became clear to me that these kinds of phenomena are very interesting to look at from a psychological perspective. How are such products that look similar in packaging being processed and how do certain circumstances make people process them differently”.

– Femke van Horen

During her postdoc, she left product imitation behind as her principal research thread, seeking a direction wholly her own. She began to study uncertainty, trying to understand how uncertainty due to, for instance, economic and environmental crises or political revolutions, affect decision making. She joined VU Amsterdam in 2013 as an assistant professor, while the consumer behavior team at the department was still small. Joining VU also led Femke to work on issues of sustainability.

“Our slogan is “science with a purpose” and sustainability is a big topic within our department alongside health and digital communication. This is also something that I really value of our department, encouraging us to investigate important and impactful questions”.

– Femke van Horen

Over the years, Femke’s research has grown into a broad program. Building on her expertise in similarity, uncertainty, and sustainability, she now investigates how (visual or vocal) similarity to an existing counterpart (e.g. animal meat, human arm, or a human voice) can help or hinder the acceptance of innovations, such as plant-based meat alternatives, robotic arms and chatbots. Femke explains that similarity allows us to relate an unfamiliar product to something we already know, which can provide a sense of comfort. But there is a tipping point. When something becomes too similar, consumers start to observe the differences which can lead to a disconfirmation of expectations, resulting in lower evaluations.

“My inaugural address allowed me to connect things, the pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place. At the core, I realized that my research revolves around three domains: similarity, uncertainty and sustainability.”

– Femke van Horen

One step build towards the next

Femke wishes that marketing pursued a more organic approach to research. She believes that more programmatic research deserves wider acceptance in the field. By investigating a phenomenon piece by piece and systematically building on previous findings, a more coherent picture and larger understanding of the phenomenon can start to appear.

“I think research benefits from not adopting a shotgun approach, jumping from one hot topic to the next. Being programmatic shows me how I can build on insights from previous projects in my new research. I have looked at the topic of copycatting from many different angles. The findings of all these projects together showed me that the effectiveness of copycats boils down to the same psychological process. Taking a programmatic approach, is what allowed me to understand the phenomenon much better.”

– Femke van Horen

Of course, Femke adds, meaningful research must contribute novel insight. In some of her own work, reviewers asked her to do more, add more, and cover more ground in one paper. But like a marathon, she believes in building research step by step, and leaving room for later projects and for other research teams to contribute.

A narrower scope isn’t a weaker paper. Not forcing every relevant question into a single project is also better for marketing as a science.

 “What I do see now is that editors increasingly allow researchers not to do everything reviewers suggest. But it is still the culture we are brought up in, and that’s hard to change. The reviewers still want to have a strong voice in the final paper, often asking for additions that might honestly be better suited as a separate project”.

– Femke van Horen

The point isn’t to lower the bar. Maintaining rigor but asking less, while doing it well benefits the review process. Papers like that progress briskly, avoiding the grind of too many review rounds.

The long haul

Femke sits on both sides of the process, writing and reviewing papers. Still, she was caught off guard when she received IJRM’s Outstanding Reviewer Award. For her, reviewing was often like a black box, not really knowing whether you indeed picked up on the crucial weaknesses of the paper. So, it was a welcome surprise to find out that her reviews are recognized as providing valuable insights and guidance that help making a paper better.  

Her recipe for reviewer-success? Femke argues that two points are crucial: First, evaluate the paper’s contribution and rigor. Second, avoid nit-picking, look at the bigger picture, tease out the important points and provide a constructive way forward.

“Respect is also crucial. We reviewers tend to be very critical, but at the same time it’s important to remember it is an N = 1. It’s a subjective judgement. And it’s important to have suggestions about how problems can be solved.”

– Femke van Horen

Femke says that she still has to reject a lot of the papers that come her way. She always looks for the strengths of a paper, but when it’s too much of a long shot, it’s better for everyone involved to kill it early, even though it is painful for the authors.

“The main reasons to reject for me are contribution, rigor, and depth. I really dislike papers that are too descriptive. It’s important to position the paper well and to ground it into existing theory. Or when papers promise something, but don’t deliver. Hypotheses that are actually not being tested.”

– Femke van Horen

For Femke, reviewing keeps her sharp in her own research too, making her more vigilant about mistakes and confounds. It also exposes her to different theories, paradigms, and creative experiments.

As an AE, Femke likes to see how papers progress, how they evolve and become better through the review process.

“I really like the AE role, it asks you to synthesize the important concerns and provide a path forward. You also see the different points your reviewers pick up on, and sometimes you see they they pick up on exactly the same things. And it’s really important to select good reviewers, those who are willing to put in the effort. At the end of the day, we as AEs and reviewers are the guardians of quality.”

– Femke van Horen

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Meet FEMKE VAN HOREN

If you were not in academia, what would you be?

That’s really difficult, I wanted to go into academia as of the second year of my psychology degree. A professional runner maybe? But training for long races can be so time consuming, especially if you have kids, it’s difficult to combine.

Where was your last holiday? 

We went to Salzburg, Austria. We did a lot of hiking in Salzburg Highlands. During our three-day hike from hut to hut we stayed in this fantastic vegan-only hut where we had a great four course meal every evening after a long day of hiking. We also went to the many lakes in the area, did lots of swimming, and went to one of the biggest ice caves. It was great with the kids, they are 12 and 15, so you can do a lot with them. Luckily, they still like hiking, even though they are teenagers.

I’ve been to Austria before, but there is still so much to see. Three years ago, we visited the godmother of my son, who lives in Graz. During the same trip, we went to Faaker Lake in Carinthia. On the campsite we saw a poster for a table tennis tournament. Since my son plays table tennis, we joined the competition. Coincidently, Martin Schreier, Christoph Fuchs, and their kids were there too! It was a little accidental academic reunion around the table-tennis table.  

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This article was written by

Marie Brand

Ph.D. candidate at the WU, Vienna