I’ve been off social media for a little while now. Just logged in and saw what’s happening with the WSJ article.

I was one of the presenters in the session where this particular abstract was supposed to have been presented.

Some thoughts:

I’m not a researcher per se but just someone with an avid interest in marketing.

I submitted an abstract to ICAMA-KAS related to BTS and brand desire, looking specifically at the case of iPhone users stepping out of the Apple ecosystem to buy the BTS Samsung Galaxy Buds+

Emily and Fatima’s presentation was originally supposed to be part of session 1, but was moved to session 2 because of technical difficulties.

At the time, I thought the presentation was a bit half-baked, but didn’t give it too much thought.

Here are R3’s live tweets at the time: https://twitter.com/ther3journal/status/1322358931755249667

The process for submission to the conference was to send a long abstract, which would be reviewed by a panel.

In my case, my abstract was tentatively accepted with the caveat that the panelists wanted to see concrete data. They advised me conduct a survey to gather it, & I did.

So there was feedback during this process, atleast for my abstract. I cannot comment on other presenters’ experiences.

While I understand that this isn’t the same as a full peer review, I do want to point out that there was atleast some oversight during the process of selecting abstracts for presentation at the conference.

My abstract was not selected for publication - rightly so, it was too early for it to be turned into a full paper. I believe it’s the same case for Emily and Fatima’s abstract as well.

Leaving aside the topic of why Emily felt confident in taking her abstract to WSJ....

It’s unclear how the conversation between Emily and the journalist came about. I find the lack of transparency around this unsettling and disappointing.

I’m also disappointed at how R3 has handled this, and feel that their statement and tweets upto this moment lack answers to legitimate questions and concerns. I believe greater transparency is needed here.

I’ve seen tweets saying that they’re preparing a longer statement, and I hope they take all the feedback they got for their first one and provide concrete answers and details with full transparency.

In the interest of full transparency, here’s a recording of my own presentation:


I’m happy to share the abstract I submitted as well, if there’s interest.

I’d appreciate feedback, of course! But do keep in mind that I don’t have bandwidth to continue working on this at the moment. Again, I’m not a researcher, just someone who works in marketing.