The rise and fall of the Latin Square in marketing:a cautionary tale

Purpose This paper aims to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of experimental design and development in academic marketing since 1950. Design/methodology/approach The paper does so by taking one experimental design, Latin Square, and describing its history and development within academic marketing in detail. Findings The Latin Square is a powerful experimental technique that first rose to prominence in agriculture in the 1920s and has remained a key tool in this discipline ever since. The technique was introduced into marketing in 1953, and enjoyed a period of great influence and popularity until 1973, when it abruptly disappeared from the publications of the discipline. Careful investigation of the research record of this period revealed that its demise was due to increasingly poor application method that led to compromised results, combined with an erroneous assignation of superior capabilities to full and fractional factorials that occurred at approximately the same time. Practical implications Two major implications arise from these findings. First, the discipline has incorrectly retired a tool that is still unmatched in some key research situations. Second, the errors that led to the technique's demise led to the rise of other techniques that do not have the capabilities that many researchers appear to think they have. Originality/value This is the first longitudinal historical case study of a single research technique that has appeared in print in a major journal, and it reveals aspects of the discipline's approach to science that could not have been illustrated in any other way.