The concept of marketing and its mismatch with academic practice

Marketing is best understood as the organization’s customer-facing system that creates, communicates, delivers, and governs exchanges to sustain relationships and, ultimately, organizational survival. Its core priority is customer value in competitive contexts, while other stakeholders matter insofar as they enable that value within rules set by public policy and regulation. We argue for a bounded, integrative definition—specific enough to guide action yet general enough to travel across settings—that treats markets as adaptive exchange systems and positions marketing as a dynamic learning loop: sensing shifts in needs, iterating offerings and prices, orchestrating channels and complements, and converting traction into diffusion. Against this managerial reality, academic practice often misfires; it leans too much on aggregate firm proxies or student/online samples, suffers construct–measure disconnects and identification gaps, and elevates non-actionable levers and proxy outcomes, producing findings that are less helpful to real decision-making processes. Realizing that it is a stretch-goal, we propose re-anchoring marketing research in more decision-relevant data and designs. Implementing this, the discipline is able to generate cumulative, managerially useful knowledge consistent with marketing’s purpose.