Scholarly Research in Marketing:

Exploring the "4 Eras" of Thought

Development
(Authors: William L. Wilkie and Elizabeth S. Moore)

Continuing
Marketing Era III & IV

Marketing Mainstream-Marketing,
Management, and the Sciences" (19501980
The boom Arrives

The Field Evolves in New Directions

science as the basis for marketing thought development
viewing the field from the perspective of marketing managers
in order to help them undertake successful marketing
programs
The Turn to a Managerial Perspective
This perspective certainly brought professional and vocational

appeal to university courses, in the sense that it directly

prepared students for jobs
significant new concepts that were introduced during this time
like the marketing concept (John McKitterick 1957);
market segmentation as a managerial strategy (Wendell
Smith 1956); the marketing mix (Neil Borden 1964); the
4 P's (E. Jerome McCarthy 1960); brand image (Burleigh
Gardner and Sidney Levy 1955); marketing
management as analysis, planning, and control (Philip
Kotler 1967); the hierarchy of effects (Robert Lavidge
and Gary Steiner 1961); marketing myopia (Theodore
Levitt 1960); and the wheel of retailing (Stanley
Hollander 1960; Malcolm McNair 1958).

The Emergence of the Quantitative and

Behavioral Sciences
The Nationally Planned Infusion of Management

Science into Marketing: (1) a national effort to

infuse mathematics and statistics into business
schools and (2) the development of the
computer as a research tool.
The Advance of Consumer Research

Growth in the Academic Infrastructure During

Era III

Growth in the Academic Infrastructure During Era III

A Marketing Think Tank Emerges : a new think tank, the
Marketing Science Institute (MSI), was formed in 1961.
Building the Research Infrastructure for Marketing Science:
Mathematical Models and Methods in Marketing, a book
written by the Harvard mathematics program participants
(Bass et al. 1961), the comprehensive Marketing Decision
Making: A Model Building Approach (Kotler 1971)
Building the Research Infrastructure for Consumer
Behavior
formation of a new group, the Association for Consumer
Research (ACR), in 1970. The field grew quickly: In its first
ten years, ACR expanded to more than 1000 members in
some 20 nations
This movement was much assisted by the appearance in
1974 of Journal of Consumer Research (JCR), with Ronald
Frank as its first editor

New Topics in Marketing Knowledge

Development

Era IV: "The Shift Intensifies-A

Fragmentation of the Mainstream"
(1980-Present)
The Overall Character of Era IV
New challenges arise in business world: shortterm financial focus, downsizing, globalization,
and reengineering.
Dominant perspectives are questioned in
philosophy of science debates.
Publish-or-perish pressure intensifies on
academics.
Knowledge infrastructure expands and
diversifies into specialized interest areas.

The Pressures Build

as the Internet opened communication across
international boundaries, interest in marketing
concepts exploded geometrically
Editorial change in JM to publish only scholarly article
The independent status of ACR and JCR were
instrumental in advancing these academic positions
on knowledge development during the remainder of
Era IV.
Scientific advances had brought more complex
concepts and methodologies into the marketing field.
Universities adopted "publish-or-perish career paths
for their new faculty, which added pressures for
increasingly sophisticated research training in
doctoral programs

Business Education Goes Global: Bringing

New Academics into Marketing

the Russian Association of Business Education

now numbers more than 50 schools, In China,

the Ministry of Education has accredited more
than 60 new MBA program , There are now
more than 100 business schools offering MBA
degrees in the United Kingdom; some 120 MBA
schools in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland.

An Outpouring of New Publication Outlets

Research Specialization and the Fragmentation of

the Marketing Mainstream

With respect to fragmentation, Baumgartner and

Pieters (2003) find that citation patterns indicate at

least five natural subareas of marketing thought,
which they label as follows:
1. Core marketing(8 journals, JMR is most influential),
2. Consumer behavior ( 9 journals, JCR is most
influential)
3. Managerial marketing (9 journals, Harvard Business
Review is most influential)
4. Marketing applications (21 journals, JM is most
influential)
5. Marketing education (2 journals, Journal o f
Marketing Education is most influential).

Era IV's Attention to Marketing and Society

A Specialized Infrastructure Develops: (1)
assists thinkers in learning about important
developments, (2) provides vehicles for
publication of quality research, and (3)
generally
facilitates
communication
and
interchange among researchers who have
common interests
A Wide Range of Research Topics and Issues :
Right to Safety, Right to Be Informed, Right to
Choose & Right to Be Heard.
Moving from a sole focus on consumer rights, a
second framework of interest has recently been
developed by Sprott and Miyazaki (2002): The
four primary categories are 1. Protection of
consumers, 2. Protection of marketers, 3. Policy

Quo Vadis? Quo Vadimus ?

Where are we going? Where should we want

to go?
Conclusion 1: Marketing's Treatment of
Societal Issues Has Changed over Time
Conclusion 2: The "Marketing and Society"
Area Today Is Itself Fragmented
Public Policy and Marketing.
Macro-marketing
Consumer Economics
Social Marketing
Marketing Ethics
International Consumer Policy

Conclusion 3: Marketing and Society Belongs as an

Intrinsic Part of Mainstream Marketing Thought

Conclusion4 : Fragmentation of Marketing Thought
Is a Powerful, Perhaps Irresistible Force-However, It
Deserves Careful Consideration and Possible Action
by the Community of Scholars in Our Field
Conclusion 5: A Major Cost of Fragmentation Is
That Knowledge Is Being Lost from Our Field- This
Calls for Directed Consideration of Modifications to
Doctoral Education in Marketing
Conclusion 6: A Call to Action Is Appropriate for the
Field of Academic Marketing-It Is Time for an
Academic Marketing Summit to Explore Viable
Means to Enhance Scholarship in Our Field