Making Marketing Discipline More Scientific–Contesting Christian Grönroos’s “Toward a Marketing Renaissance”

Abstract

This article examines Christian Grönroos’s “Toward a Marketing Renaissance: Challenging Underlying Assumptions,” offering support for the advancement of marketing as a discipline while raising several critical issues with Grönroos’s approach. First, Grönroos’s analysis and proposals lack clarity regarding their focus on either marketing practice or the theoretical discipline of marketing. His analysis of foundational assumptions appears grounded in a predominantly managerial view of marketing, potentially limiting its scope. Second, the suggested foundational shifts overlook significant developments within academic marketing research. Finally, Grönroos’s vision of marketing as “meaningfulness” is based on an idealistic, marketer- and consumer-centric perspective that does not offer a solid foundation for marketing as an academic discipline. This article advocates positioning marketing firmly within the social sciences and proposes distinguishing between three perspectives in marketing scholarship: (1) marketing practice, (2) research into marketing practice (both empirical and theoretical), and (3) meta-theoretical research into the discipline itself. By identifying key research directions within these domains, the paper outlines an agenda for future scholarship that embraces marketing’s complexity, promotes rigorous and critical theory-building, and enhances marketing’s role within the broader social sciences.