Suchergebnisse

This article seeks to explain why marketing practitioners should continue to ignore marketing academic research. The reasons are organized into seven categories: customers, structure, causality, reductionism, precision, generalisations and replication. Evidence is drawn mostly from award winning articles. In the short term, the author advocates removing claims of usefulness from academic work, celebrating its academic value and maintaining the gap between academics and practitioners. In the long term, he anticipates the development of new approaches to academic work that might bridge the academic/practitioner gap.

There is no consensus on what to teach in marketing theory or how to teach it: no established syllabus, no standard textbook and no standard teaching method. In addition academics seem to have little interest in teaching marketing theory and students have even less interest in learning about it. This article describes how anacademic, asked to teach a new marketing theory course at short notice, overcame these difficulties by designing and implementing an innovative marketing theory course using a hermeneutic approach.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine whether or not marketing academics practise what they preach. Are they marketing‐oriented in their main business of knowledge creation and dissemination?Design/methodology/approachThe epistemological marketing literature and performance at producing true marketing knowledge are critically reviewed. Practitioner marketing knowledge is investigated through the literature, personal contacts and a simple direct research study.FindingsThe paper finds that only one kind of knowledge, so‐called "marketing science", is now regarded as valid. Unfortunately, this kind of knowledge can only be built through extensive and independent testing. After 50 years of following this approach, the output is very small, very expensive and largely of no interest to practitioners because marketing knowledge means something quite different to them. Marketing academics have become myopic as to what marketing knowledge is, and they have become production‐oriented, with the objective of producing as much of it as possible.Practical implicationsThere is a need to stop trying to tell practitioners what to do and to shift one's research emphasis to conceptual humanism, postmodern science, direct and action research, tools for practitioners, marketing facts, and educating the whole student.Originality/valueThe paper has made an attempt to change the course of marketing academic literature.