Rethinking marketing: back to purpose
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COMMENTARY
Rethinking marketing: back to purpose Julia A. Fehrer 1,2 Published online: 2 December 2020 # Academy of Marketing Science 2020
Abstract Key and colleagues raise some serious criticisms related to the marketing discipline’s purpose drift and short-sighted approach to rigor and relevance. They provide a comprehensive and nuanced picture of the grand challenges in marketing, including the loss of domain expertise, detachment from real-world phenomena, nurturing of methodological monocultures and more generally a perception problem in academia and management practice. This commentary complements their assessment by reviewing strands of literature in the niches and at the edge of mainstream marketing, where we may find some solutions or at least seeds for solutions as a starting point to refine, recalibrate and potentially reshape the future of marketing and marketing research. Keywords Marketing myopia . Grand challenges . Systems thinking . Value cocreation . Market shaping
Introduction The article ‘Marketing’s theoretical and conceptual value proposition: opportunities to address marketing’s influence’, written by Thomas Martin Key, Terry Clark, OC Ferrell, David W. Steward and Leyland Pitt, raises the fundamental question about the purpose of marketing. Aligned with other critical voices (such as Webster and Lusch 2013; Möller et al. 2020; Yadav 2010; Jaworski and Kohli 2017), the authors alert the marketing research community to the need for a radical revision of how we conceptualize, study, and apply marketing. They point to four interrelated problems: 1) loss of domain expertise, 2) detachment from real-world phenomena (see also, Möller et al. 2020; Nenonen et al. 2017; Webster and Lusch 2013), 3) nurturing of methodological monocultures (see also Hunt 2018; McAlister 2016; Jaworski and Kohli 2017; Zeithaml et al. 2020) and, 4) detachment from the discipline’s value proposition and purpose. I believe that this debate offers great opportunities to refine, recalibrate and potentially reshape the future of marketing and marketing
* Julia A. Fehrer [email protected] 1
The University of Auckland Business School, Owen G Glenn Building, 12 Grafton Road, Auckland, New Zealand
2
University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany
research and, as an emergent scholar, I feel deeply honored to contribute to this debate. While I agree with the important issues raised by eminent scholars in our discipline and recognize similar discussions in my home turf–the Australasian and European marketing research communities, I will argue that some solutions, or at least seeds for solutions may be right in front of us, in the niches of our discipline and at the edge of mainstream marketing. More specifically, I will point to system theories, growing with and out of (S-D logic), which provide a range of marketing frameworks and midrange theories (Brodie et al. 2011; Vargo and Lusch 2017) that acknowledge and embrace the marketing discipline’s diversity. Further, the field of business and industrial marketing presents an ext
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