Since last year at my school the buzz in the marketing department is around the 37th EMAC conference we are hosting next year. Dr. Keith Perks, a colleague and a very good friend of is the conference chair. The title for the conference is “Marketing Landscapes: A Pause for Thought”.
The theme was put forward because “marketing has come under increasing scrutiny by scholars, practitioners, governments, and pressure groups in the past decade. Leading scholars in the field have held special forums to debate what is perceived as a decline in the status of marketing as a discipline, and its position in the corporate hierarchy from a central role in strategy making to a lower order functional role. Influential non-governmental organisations and governments are bringing marketing to task over its perceived and real lack of concern for ethical and socially responsible behaviour. Marketing academics have been accused of disengaging with the corporate world and their research as becoming increasingly irrelevant to the practice of marketing.”
The theme of the conference was developed “to examine the marketing landscape, to continue the debate, and assess if we have over specialised the discipline into ‘silos’ and narrowed our perspectives resulting in a failure to look at the bigger picture. Marketing has broadened in the last three decades of the 20th century adding to the complexity and diversity of the field. The questions to be raised at the 2008 conference are: Have we gone too far? Do we need a single universal paradigm or multiple paradigms? How can we reconnect with the corporate world? How does marketing respond to its critics?”
How true this is when we start looking at the field of marketing and the largely esoteric research being carried out by experts across the world. I was reading an article published by Rust and others in Journal of Marketing in 2004 titled “Measuring Marketing Productivity: Current Knowledge and Future directions”.
The authors identified three major challenges facing us in the field of marketing.
1. Relating marketing activities to long-term effects
2. Seperation of individual marketing activities from other actions
3. Use of purely financial methods to measure marketing performance which has proved inadequate for justifying marketing investments and therefore, the need for non-financial marketing measurements.
These are tough challenges in front of marketing scholars however, there are still no definitive answers for the same. Furthermore, there are questions as to how the marketing actions add to the value of the firm. Few studies are available but their generalizability is questionable.
Strategic questions which emerge for marketing presently are:
The above mentioned issues highlight two important things according to me.
We will have to find answers to the above questions soon if marketing is to regain its once respected position in the field of management.
Rust, Roland T.; Ambler, Tim; Carpenter, Gregory S.; Kumar, V.; Srivastava, Rajendra K. (2004), “Measuring Marketing Productivity: Current Knowledge and Future Directions,” Journal of Marketing, 68 (4), 76-90.
No related posts.
Thanks for the inspiration, your blog looks excellent! Guess the thoughts will help me build my dissertation further.
Rather superb entry, definitely useful stuff. Never ever considered I’d find the facts I need right here. I have been looking everywhere in the internet for some time now and had been starting to get discouraged. Fortunately, I happened across your blog and received precisely what I was searching for.