Marketer behaviour: a case for making this socially real

Abstract

This article argues that the marketing canon, as presently configured, has failed to confer social reality to the acts of its key protagonists–marketers. As an adjunct to both collective and contextually diverse perspectives on marketing, more emphasis on marketer agency is suggested, this in the context of nominally focused anthropological enquiry. It is further argued that the status afforded to consumer behaviour be similarly conferred for marketer behaviour, the latter under-represented within marketing research. Drawing on ontological nominalism, speech act theory and Searle’s social constructionism, this article addresses implications for intersubjective meaning within our community and offers provisional thoughts for how this might be structured and improved. It ends with a call to action for both the rehabilitation and expansion of purposeful marketer behaviour study.