For the many who attended and enjoyed this years’ Regional conference on “The Future of Marketing Practice” we have some great news! The date of next year’s conference is set. Wednesday 6^th June 2018, at Aston Business School.

For those who couldn’t make it this time around, this event kicked off our “marketing-as-practice” project, researching and exploring how we as professional marketers can gain greater influence, improve the way we go about our day-to-day marketing work and ensure the future of the profession.

Chris Daly, CEO of the CIM, set out an agenda for “marketing-as-practice” explaining what we’re planning to achieve by next year’s conference. Including, working with the learned institution the British Academy of Management, who have provided research funding towards the first phase of the project, to work with you to understand how we can develop, improve and share “best practice”.

The aim is to develop a CIM and BAM “marketing-as-practice” tool kit characterising different marketing environments, their challenges and a potential set of “best practice” interventions to make our practice more effective.

We also aim to develop a community of CIM members and academics around “marketing-as-practice” to form an ongoing means of developing practice in the medium to long-term. Along with establishing a medium term research project designed to keep marketers up-to-date with ways of continually improving their practice.

We promised to keep everyone up-to-date on our progress, so have we made any? Yes, we have!

• From the conference we have a group of the region’s marketers who want to work with us in the next stage of the research. You’ll hear from us shortly on the next steps.

• At this year’s British Academy of Management, at Warwick, Dr Keith Glanfield (Regional Vice-Chair) and Professor Katy Mason (BAM Vice-Chair) discussed and work-shopped “marketing-as-practice” with a select group of academics. This covered developing our research themes on professional identity, marketing’s influence, innovating practices and creating and shaping markets. All of which will be incorporated into our research program.

• In recognition of the CIM’s influence on professional practice, the work between BAM and the CIM on “marketing-as-practice” and the contribution of the CIM’s Chief Executive to developing management practice, the British Academy of Management bestowed Chris Daly a BAM “companionship”. Bringing together even more closely those who research and practice marketing.

Our next step is to start our research and to run an evening regional event in early February to provide some preliminary findings, discuss their implications and gain input into next year’s conference. Look out for the date of this event in the next newsletter or in the regular mailing of CIM events!