Marketing’s theoretical and conceptual value proposition: opportunities to address marketing’s influence

This paper is composed of scholarly essays that explore the problematic nature of marketing’s influence within the academy and organizations, potential explanations and causes, and how conceptual and theoretical research can address and move our discipline forward. Each section represents material and research developed through interactive sessions from Academy of Marketing Science conferences. Topics include the history of the marketing discipline, its innovation and loss of domain expertise; important internal and external environmental concepts that have impeded relevance and theoretical impact; foundational elements of how the discipline frames problems, provides methodological-based solutions, and influences the very subjects of our research in such a way as to lesson our contribution to scholarship and practice; and finally the discipline’s inability to understand the intangible nature of marketing activities and outcomes, as well as marketers’ struggle to articulate relevance in a way that is easily understood in the language of finance. Through this critical self-examination of the field of marketing a central premise emerged—a discipline-wide drift and myopic approach to rigor and relevance.