Challenging the Boundaries of Marketing

Abstract

The technological and digital revolutions experienced over recent decades have fundamentally transformed marketing practice, consumer behavior, and competitive dynamics and presented new policy and societal challenges. At the same time, the world’s many economic, social, and political problems can benefit from proactive, purpose-driven marketing thought. On this stage of dynamic change and unprecedented opportunity, the marketing discipline is poised to offer new knowledge that contributes to the full range of marketing stakeholders, including the students we educate. Despite this potential, a great deal of marketing scholarship remains safely within the confines of its present boundaries— relying on mainstream assumptions, theories, and methods that tend to reinforce, not challenge, our thinking. Like most scientific communities, marketing has the trappings of Kuhn’s (1962, p. 5) “normal science,” which “is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like,” a “willingness to defend that assumption, if necessary at considerable cost,” and a tendency to suppress novelties “subversive of its basic commitments.” There are many reasons for this inertia. Institutional and individual rewards are tilted toward incremental research that safely builds programmatic streams for tenure while a riskaverse journal review process can easily stamp out innovation. Given these forces, many early-career marketing scholars operate within the safe boundaries of the discipline while pledging to return to innovative opportunities in the later stages of their careers. Unfortunately, most never do. It is within this context that we introduce a series of innovative articles designed to inform and inspire research that broadens the current boundaries of marketing, including the phenomena, theories, methods, and findings the field considers important and interesting. Articles in this series include conceptual reexaminations that challenge assumptions in wellestablished research areas. These articles do so by questioning current boundaries and offering fresh research agendas. Other articles highlight new challenges to the field by offering conceptual frameworks to structure new research approaches with the potential to transform the discipline. The first of these “Challenging the Boundaries of Marketing” articles appears in the current issue and focuses on “Marketing in the Sharing Economy” (Eckhardt et al. 2019). We asked this team of authors to investigate the changing nature of marketing in the sharing economy—a critical perspective that has been missing from most research published in marketing journals. Defining the sharing economy as a scalable socioeconomic system that employs technology-enabled platforms to provide users with temporary access to tangible and intangible resources that may be crowdsourced, the paper examines how the sharing economy forces us to rethink three foundations of marketing: institutions (e.g., consumers, firms and channels, regulators), processes (e.g., innovation, brands, customer experience, value appropriation), and value creation (e.g., value for consumers, value for firms, value for society). Importantly, the article offers wide-ranging future research opportunities that confront the boundaries of marketing thought. These authors, Giana Eckhardt, Mark Houston, Baojun Jiang, Cait Lamberton, Aric Rindfleisch, and Georgios Zervas, examine the sharing economy from remarkably diverse perspectives and methodological approaches, representing marketing strategy, empirical modeling, analytic modeling, mainstream consumer research, and consumer cultural theory. This interdisciplinary perspective reinforces the Journal of Marketing’s (JM’s) position as the discipline’s broadest and most inclusive journal and reflects our view that the discipline will be stronger when we unite to solve the field’s most pressing questions and problems. Consistent with this view, the second article in the series, “Uniting the Tribes: Using Text for Marketing Insight,” is coauthored by Jonah Berger, Ashlee