The marketing discipline’s troubled trajectory: The manifesto conversation, candidates for central focus, and prognosis for renewal

Abstract

Numerous commentators note that marketing is entering its fifth era of evolutionary development as a troubled discipline. Marketing’s troubled evolutionary trajectory has led to what this article labels “the manifesto conversation.” Using the sociology of academic disciplines as a theoretical foundation, this article contributes to the manifesto conversation by (1) showing how each of the discipline’s stages of evolutionary development was shaped by one key question, (2) developing an analysis of the discipline’s stakeholders in each era, (3) identifying four key evolutionary developments in Era IV (1980–2020) that led to the discipline’s troubled trajectory, (4) showing the importance of a discipline’s mainstream central focus for developing a discipline’s sense of academic community, (5) identifying the manifesto conversation’s three major candidates for a central focus, (6) discussing whether the discipline can renew itself in Era V (2020-?), and (7) providing a tentative prognosis for such a renewal.