On Rethinking Marketing: Our Discipline, Our Practice, Our Methods

TLDR

Marketing has struggled to contribute original insights to strategy, largely because the discipline has focused on dysfunctional relationships and has resisted qualitative methods. The author argues that treating marketing as an applied discipline has limited its strategic contributions, reinforced a focus on dysfunctional relationships, and fostered resistance to qualitative methods rooted in relativism and subjectivism.

Abstract

Rethinking marketing should start with answers to three questions: Why has our discipline made so few original contributions to the strategy dialogue? Why have we focused on dysfunctional, rather than functional, relationships, i.e. on unsuccessful marketing practice rather than successful practice? Why do qualitative studies lack acceptance in marketing? I suggest that the fact that marketing has viewed itself as an “applied discipline” has significantly contributed to our making so few original contributions to the strategy dialogue. Furthermore, the “applied discipline” view has contributed to our focusing on dysfunctional and unsuccessful, rather than functional and successful, relationships. Finally, the lack of acceptance in marketing for qualitative methods has resulted from advocates of those methods embracing relativism, constructionism and subjectivism. In general, the time for obfuscation and obscurantism masquerading as profundity has passed; the time for reasoned rethinking is just beginning.