guest article by V Kumar, JM Editor-in-Chief
The discipline of marketing has been in continuous evolution over the last few decades. To understand the forces that have stimulated these changes over time and track the progression of marketing thought, it is essential to identify both the dominant views and corresponding triggers. In my Journal of Marketing Editorial (January 2015) I provide a detailed synthesis of this evolution. Starting in 1994, marketing adopted a predominantly resource conscious view, focusing on issues of customer profitability and use of organizational resources to improve marketing effectiveness. These included measuring customer profitability and maximizing value of the customer to the firm by optimizing resource allocation decisions. This emphasis was a result of significant improvements in data storage and processing, abundance of and ease of collecting individual customer level data and development of new analytical and empirical methods.
Although efficiently allocating resources had become a top priority for both researchers and practitioners by 2004, measures and metrics linking to financial performance was lacking. This spurred several important initiatives such as The Boardroom Project aimed at establishing measurement standards for business performance. At this point it was clear that marketing had to be viewed as much more than a discretionary expense. Beginning of 2005, the marketing field gained an important standing in the corporate boardroom by brining accountability to marketing activities. The three forces that triggered the expansion of marketing into an investment based outlook were technological advances in sophisticated data management applications, a deeper level of insight and the ability to formulate marketing activities directed at the customer level. This resulted in marketing moving beyond simply being an expense item to being viewed as an investment.
The emerging paradigm today is to view marketing as an integral part of the organization’s decision making framework. This requires complete integration of marketing activities with other functions. As such understanding the interface of marketing with other business functions will remain critical. The factors that have led to the evolution of this perspective are first and foremost changes in media usage patterns across channels, the increasing pressure to prove the link between investments in marketing and a company’s bottom line and linked to the prior two is the emphasis on customer engagement such as getting customers to refer more people, talk to other customers, and exchange information with the firm as a driver of profitability.
We are in the midst of some exciting times! As editor in chief of the Journal of Marketing it is my priority to stay current with and respond to changes in the business world and dynamic environmental landscape. Ensuring that future research directions are rigorous and relevant is a top priority. This will ultimately empower others through knowledge and thought leadership and have a long term impact on both the science and practice of marketing.
V Kumar, Ph.D.
Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Marketing
Regents Professor
Chang Jiang Scholar, Huazhong University of Science and Technology
Richard and Susan Lenny Distinguished Chair, & Professor of Marketing
Mack Robinson College of Business
Georgia State University
