Trulaske’s Detelina Marinova named co-editor of Journal of Marketing

By Kelsey Allen

Like many researchers, Professor Detelina Marinova hopes her work has a lasting impact. Whether it’s by understanding better ways to respond to a global financial crisis, rethinking the employment application, or, in Marinova’s case, helping salespeople and health care providers communicate and interact more effectively, faculty researchers at Trulaske are often motivated by making the world a better place.

In July 2022, Marinova will officially step into her newly appointed role as the co-editor of the premier flagship journal in the field, the Journal of Marketing, where she will play a crucial role in developing high-impact content. “It’s a tremendous responsibility but also an opportunity to improve and shape research — and this is the ultimate job of a researcher and a scholar,” Marinova says.

A Practical Approach

As a senior scholar, Marinova helps shape the Marketing Department at Trulaske as it expands its expertise and talents in a range of subjects.

“We’ve really taken the focus of the department to a more practical level,” Marinova says. “Students get the novel and most up-to-date understanding of how marketing works, of what skills they need in order to be good marketers. We have avant-garde programs where they get hands-on, practical experience and involvement of companies — actual companies that they can get internships with and understand firsthand how the work is being done before they even get a degree.”

The Inside Sales Lab, for example, places student interns at companies where they earn credit while getting paid to assist with the sales process or even close sales themselves. Over the past 10 years, the lab has built a reputation as a training ground for future sales leaders. The department also recently launched undergraduate certificates in sales and customer development as well as marketing analytics.

Marinova teaches marketing management and analytics courses at the undergraduate, MBA and PhD levels and is a recipient of several teaching awards, including the John A. Riggs, Jr., Excellence in MBA Teaching Award, Vanguard Award for Innovative Teaching and Use of Technology, and Champion of Applied Learning Award in the Crosby MBA program.

The Future of Knowledge Discovery

The chance to work with doctoral students is what brought Marinova to Mizzou; the previous institution she worked at eliminated its PhD program. At Trulaske, half of her workweek is spent mentoring doctoral students and collaborating on research projects. “And I love that!” she says.

“They are very bright, intelligent minds who are looking to learn,” she continues. “I enjoy the intellectual discourse — these aha moments that I get to hear about and I get to contribute to and that push the future of knowledge discovery. That’s my professional goal: I want to contribute to a better future world because we know more. I believe that’s the way to do it — to give PhD students the tools, train them and pass on what I know.”

The college’s Marketing Department has an excellent track record of placing PhD candidates into tenure-track jobs.

Marinova’s last doctoral student, Bitty Balducci, is now an assistant professor of marketing at Washington State University. They are still collaborating on multidisciplinary research with Mizzou’s Matt Gordon, a professor of English, and Yi Shang, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, that explores the science behind how voice shapes interactions between people.

“It’s your voice. It’s the pitch. It’s the loudness,” Marinova says. “There are about a hundred different descriptions of voice that influence persuasion and the outcome of these interactions between salespeople and business clients.”

Marinova and her colleagues hope to use their data to provide insights that enable more effective sales training, management and evaluation. Next, Marinova will submit a grant to the National Science Foundation to study how vocal and verbal cues impact interactions between patients and doctors.

Field Expansion

This type of interdisciplinary research is what Marinova, her co-editors and editor-in-chief Shrihari Sridhar, PhD ’09, hope to publish more of in the journal.

“All of us work in different areas, but we share the same values,” says Marinova, who served on Sridhar’s dissertation committee. “We want to publish knowledge that is useful and accessible and also expands the boundaries of the discipline. We are at the intersection of a lot of different fields, and working with other disciplines — with engineering, with medicine, with journalism, with the different professional fields and even basic sciences —  is the way to move forward.”

Marinova previously served as associate editor of the Journal of Marketing Research on the editorial review boards of the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and Journal of Retailing.

Srinath Gopalakrishna, department chair and professor of marketing at Trulaske, says Marinova is an excellent addition to the Journal of Marketing editorial leadership team: “She is a dedicated scholar, no doubt, and brings great energy and enthusiasm to any setting. But more than anything else, I have always been impressed and greatly admired her sense of humility, her ability to empathize with different points of view and her willingness to step up for the welfare of the team. It is an honor to intellectually engage with her, and she truly exemplifies what all-around excellence means.