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.