ABSTRACT
In August 2004, a one-day symposium was held in Boston, MA, as part of the American Marketing Association’s annual summer conference. Entitled Does Marketing Need Reform? it featured the crème de la crème of US marketing scholarship, everyone from Philip Kotler and Fred Webster to Jerry Wind and Jagdish Sheth. Over a fraught 12-hour period, the leading lights of American academia earnestly debated the parlous state of theory and practice. Marketing, most delegates agreed, is facing a fundamental crisis of confidence and, more worryingly, authority (Sheth and Sisodia, 2006). It is disdained by today’s consumers, who are growing wise to marketers’ nefarious wiles. It is disdained by senior managers, who feel that marketing is failing to deliver on its much-trumpeted transformational promises. It is disdained, at least implicitly, by academicians who are talking to themselves rather than communicating with key constituents like practitioners and policy makers. The inevitable upshot of this near universal loathing is that marketing is losing touch with its markets and, if not quite plummeting into the pit of eternal damnation, the discipline’s definitely teetering on the edge of an intellectual abyss.
