Temerarious directions for marketing

Abstract

Marketing eschatology judges marketing’s sins of omission and commission and describes the future state where “good” triumphs over that which led us to error. Begins by presenting the argument that the future will reject methodological exclusivism involving the two rival claims of methodological monism to the effect that there is just one method for all the sciences and the rival claim that the study of human beings requires a methodology of its own, distinct from that of the natural sciences. Methodological exclusivism should be replaced with methodological pluralism which will be objective pluralism and not a matter of “anything goes”. Continues by arguing that marketing, in drawing theories from the behavioural sciences, has paid insufficient attention to the questions and problems to be addressed resulting in illicit grafts with dysfunctional consequences. Marketing in the future will avoid such errors. The third part discusses the status of the principles of marketing and shows how such principles will be justified in the future, other than by disavowing all such principles, unless they are the result of formal empirical inquiry. Finally, discusses marketing’s traditional vain obsession with mechanistic approaches and the belief in the universality of universal “laws” and why the future will eschew such beliefs.

Citation

O’Shaughnessy, J. (1997), "Temerarious directions for marketing", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 31 No. 9/10, pp. 677-705. https://doi.org/10.1108/03090569710180029