Developing and renewing marketing as a scientific discipline through reflexive cocreation

Abstract

Shelby V. Hunt was long interested in codifying and parameterizing the marketing discipline with a distinctive focus on the principles of making scientific claims. In their article, Hunt et al., (2022, in this issue) present their concerns about the scholarly status of marketing, highlighting the loss of a central, mainstream research focus. However, we think the real challenges are different than those that worry the authors. Marketing as a scientific discipline evolves by adapting from and contributing to theories, concepts, and methods in related research fields. Thus, we claim that the potential of marketing discipline lies in the diversity of intertwined and divergent research streams, such as service-dominant logic and consumer culture theory. We propose that a cocreational approach that questions foundational assumptions and a purely managerial orientation, is more likely to produce a renewal of marketing scholarship and provide solutions to wicked social problems than a single reductive theoretical approach.