Marketing Overview - Concepedia

Principles

Definition

Marketing is the academic field and strategic business process concerned with understanding, creating, communicating, and delivering value to target audiences and stakeholders. It systematically investigates market needs, consumer behavior, and competitive environments to build relationships that generate organizational value and contribute to societal well-being.

Ontological type

Consumer Behavior

Core Functions

Theoretical Foundations

Key developments

Key Figures

Marketing Science Consolidation era

Leonard L. Berry [1] was a leading figure in the Marketing Science Consolidation era, with affiliations at the University of Virginia [3] and Clark University [4]. His key contribution in this era includes advancing service quality measurement through SERVQUAL: A multiple-item scale for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality [7], a framework that operationalized consumer perceptions into measurable constructs and supported rigorous hypothesis testing in marketing. A. Parasuraman [2] was a central contributor in this era, collaborating with Texas A&M University [5] and University of Memphis [6] to advance marketing science. His work on SERVQUAL [7] codified consumer expectations and perceptions, shaping service strategy, measurement, and governance in service marketing during this period.

Relational and Service Orientation era

Shelby D. Hunt[1], associated with Texas Tech University[3] and Edinburgh Napier University[4] during this era, helped shape the relational orientation in marketing. The Commitment-Trust Theory of Relationship Marketing[7] articulated how commitment and trust underpin enduring customer relationships, reframing marketing beyond transactions and aligning measurement with satisfaction, loyalty, and brand as strategic assets for this era. Robert F. Lusch[2], affiliated with University of Wisconsin–Madison[5] and University of Maryland, College Park[6] during this period, helped advance service-dominant and relational perspectives through his scholarly work. Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing[8] framed firms as open, co-creative facilitators of value through interactions, a shift that anchored service-quality metrics and community-focused research in the Relational and Service Orientation era.

Engagement-Driven Digital Ecosystems era

Marko Sarstedt [1], affiliated with Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München [3] and University of Newcastle Australia [4], stands as a leading figure in engagement-focused marketing scholarship in this era. The paper 'An assessment of the use of partial least squares structural equation modeling in marketing research' [7] advanced the adoption of partial least squares SEM in marketing, enabling scalable modeling of latent constructs that underpin engagement and word-of-mouth dynamics in digital ecosystems. Christian M. Ringle [2], associated with James Cook University [5] and Universität Hamburg [6], also emerges as a methodological leader in this period. Through the same paper 'An assessment of the use of partial least squares structural equation modeling in marketing research' [7], he helped legitimize and propagate PLS-SEM as a core analytic approach for engagement-driven marketing research, supporting robust analysis of cross-channel influence and peer dynamics.