Rethinking marketing: back to purpose

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.

Trajectories of influential conceptual articles in service research

“…Lilien, 2011;Reibstein et al, 2009;Stremersch, 2021). Kohli and Haenlein (2021) emphasize that for marketing studies to be considered rigorous, they need to thrive not only for relevance but also for importance, that is, issues under research should go beyond "merely relevant" to the core of important issues for business and society (Fehrer, 2020;Bolton, 2020). Influential conceptual studies contribute to new theory discovery and justification (Yadav, 2010) and encourage, as our study demonstrates, other scholars to study issues with strong actionable implications for marketing practitioners (Kohli and Haenlein, 2021).…”

An examination of salesperson bricolage during a critical sales disruption: Selling during the Covid-19 pandemic

“…Because of these unique abilities, the sales bricoleur meaningfully contributes to the growing body of literature which investigates the intersection of entrepreneurship and marketing (e.g., de Jong, Zacharias, & Nijssen, 2021 ; Webb, Ireland, Hitt, Kistruck, & Tihanyi, 2011 ). This focus brings light to a recent paper by Fehrer (2020) , who contends that marketing needs to focus more closely on real-world phenomena. Recent sales scholarship has placed emphasis on complex and intertwined processes ( Hartmann et al, 2018 ); unique frontline configurations and service/sales ambidexterity ( Hughes & Ogilvie, 2020 ; Shiue, Tuncdogan, Wang, & Bredican, 2021 ; Yu, Patterson, & de Ruyter, 2013 ); fractal complexity ( Plouffe, Bolander, Cote, & Hochstein, 2016 ); and rapidly evolving, solution-driven selling ( Tuli et al, 2007 ).…”

Marketing Scholarship and the Sustainable Development Goals: Thoughts on Moving Forward

“…Again, it is folly to reward A but hope for B Conclusion Grönroos (1994) asked: Quo vadis marketing? Recently, a number of critical reflections have tried to answer that question (Coulter, 2016;Fehrer, 2020;Key et al, 2020). They all point in the same direction: Marketing is often unmoored from societal purpose (Bolton, 2021;Chandy et al, 2021;.…”

“…Marketing research is increasingly narrow and is largely irrelevant to marketing managers (Haenlein et al, 2021). Marketing is on the verge of finessing its way to irrelevance (Fehrer, 2020). The SDGs and a strong commitment to sustainable development create opportunities for marketing scholars to change that trajectory.…”