EXPERIMENTATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY:

Much of the consumer behavior literature is devoted to what has been referred to as Theory Applications (TA) research where the main focus is on laboratory experiments with student subjects and high internal validity. In this kind of research, the theory is expected to be generalizable but external validity, the ability to generalize the empirical findings to other settings, subjects, and contexts, is limited. In this paper, I argue that external validity concerns should be given more attention, particularly in TA research. I make three recommendations for implementing these concerns: (1) consumer behavior papers should be required to have a section indicating how increased levels of external validity can be secured including boundary conditions for the levels of manipulations used in experiments; (2) “joint ventures” between consumer behavior and marketing science researchers can be profitable and should be encouraged, and (3) analyses of electronic scanner panel data or other secondary data can be used to generate higher levels of external validity. I give three examples from the marketing literature of how findings from experiments and scanner data can be combined to advance a stream of research.