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Troubled waters: the transformation of marketing in a digital world1960s and 1970s, research attention switched from conceptual concerns of managing the marketing function to the strategic pursuit for competitive advantage (Porter, 1985). In particular, researchers in the fields of strategic management and strategic marketing (e.g. Anderson, 1982;Day and Wensley, 1983) increasingly emphasised the managerial role of strategy formulation, while strategy implementation notably served as an "invariable consequence of planning" (Thorpe and Morgan, 2007, p. 660). Fortunately, as Thorpe and Morgan (2007, p. 660) continue, insights have since "tempered our knowledge of developing marketing strategy with the realities of executing it". While strategic planning fell out of vogue in the 1980s (Webster, 2005), debates concerning marketing's central role in strategy formulation (e.g. BrowneRamaseshan et al., 2012; Varadarajan et al. 2001; Wind and Robertson, 1983) continue to elicit strong interest today (Kumar, 2015; Morgan, 2012).The reasons for this interest are clear but by no means straightforward to address within empirical research inquiry, not least because the breadth of debate has fragmented the research agenda (Browne, 2014). For example, Varadarajan (2010, p. 119) views the evolution of the field of strategic marketing as "a confluence of perspectives, paradigms, theories, concepts, frameworks, principles, methods, models and metrics from a number of related fields of study". While he suggests that this cumulative body of literature is indicative of substantive, theoretical and methodological advances, concerns that have been repeated over a number of decades are widely evident (e.g. Bartels, 1974;Wind and Robertson, 1983;Day, 1992;Reibstein et al., 2009), triggering the feared realization of an irretrievable disciplinary