How to save marketing: Let’s focus on the phenomenon

Marketing as a discipline faces critical juncture due to fragmented and largely tactical focus and misalignment with business, environmental, and societal needs. The ongoing debate in reputable marketing journals about how to resolve marketing’s dilemma has not yielded clear results. It appears to be taken for granted what marketing is. This article states that marketing based on the management approach has become myopically focused on activities without a clear purpose. The article advocates a transformative approach, in which the perspective is raised from what marketing does in an activity-based framework to what marketing is on a higher level as an overarching phenomenon. Thus, marketing’s inner meaning and purpose is in focus. Once this has been established, the choice of marketing decisions and activities should be a matter of consideration. By understanding marketing as a phenomenon, the discipline can potentially become inclusive in several ways, helping various institutions to embrace it and make it possible to reconcile conflicts between marketing’s many stakeholders and between commercial and environmental interests.