Marketing's Great Identity Crisis: A Revised Definition and an Urgent Research Agenda

Abstract

Over recent times a small but growing body of articles has suggested that, for a variety of reasons, marketing is currently in decline as a credible business discipline. This paper develops this theme and argues that the fundamental problem is a severe ‘identity crisis’ that is eroding Marketing’s influence where it really counts: in the boardroom. Symptomatic of this crisis is that many so-called Marketing practitioners, as well as academics, business commentators, and even the discipline’s own professional bodies seem to have lost sight of its essential strategic dimensions. Consequently, in an attempt to resolve the problem, this paper proposes a revised definition of Marketing: one that accommodates its various operational dimensions but within the context of its more important strategic dimensions. It also offers an urgent research agenda for resurrecting the stature of the discipline. Field of research: Contemporary Issues in Marketing

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.