Knowledge Claims in Marketing

Abstract

The primary role of academic marketing research is to generate and investigate knowledge claims about marketing. A primary role of marketing education is to pass on well established knowledge claims to our students, so that they can use them to guide marketing decision making. Unfortunately, researchers in marketing sometimes fail to establish exactly what claim they are making, or what claim they are investigating. As a result the claims we pass on to our students are often quite unclear, and even when they are clear they are sometimes poorly justified. We believe that much of the standard marketing curriculum consists of just such unclear or unwarranted claims. In this commentary we propose a procedure for clarifying and investigating claims to knowledge in marketing. As part of our exposition, we touch on some of the more seriously flawed claims in the marketing curriculum. Our agenda has three components: (1) Clarifying the content of a claim. (2) Distinguishing between different types of claims. (3) Investigating empirical claims and maintaining a healthy scepticism.