If marketing is a phenomenon of creating meaningfulness, what is meaningful marketing theory?

Marketing is again confronting foundational questions about what it fundamentally is. Responding to Grönroos’s (2026) argument that marketing’s crisis is ontological rather than methodological, this commentary engages with his call to re-anchor the discipline in a single overarching phenomenon. Building on the notion of marketing as a phenomenon of creating meaningfulness (Grönroos, 2023), the commentary examines what this phenomenological reframing implies for marketing theory. We argue that taking meaningfulness seriously destabilises core assumptions about marketing’s explanandum. To clarify what meaningful marketing theory requires, we assess marketing-indigenous meta-theories—service-dominant logic and resource-advantage theory. This assessment shows that while these frameworks offer necessary foundations, none alone can fully explain the emergence, contestation, and societal impact of meaningfulness. Instead, meaningful marketing theory benefits from a structured form of meta-theoretical pluralism in which a shared market-centric orientation provides coherence, while complementary perspectives from within and outside of marketing deepen the explanandum for meaningfulness.