Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This dissertation documents an attempt to rethink one of the most exciting socio-economic phenomena of the emerging 21 century: the concept and reality of . As marketing is a world of its own, which it takes at least a decade of reading and practice to travel across, it is important to mention what this thesis is not going to deliver. This study does not intend to rewrite any of the innumerable theories marketing, nor is it a fast practical guide on how to sell more at lower costs. It is not a basis for another marketing hype, nor a suitable asset when opening a consulting agency. And, it is not another attempt to revitalize a longforgotten 30-year-old business idea in the new costume of marketing.

A theory marketing explains marketing. A theory marketing explains phenomena that marketing is concerned with. A theory marketing contains marketing when explaining something else. The purpose of this section is to subsume the state of the art and science surrounding these three perspectives. It unveils that, as it theoretically stands, everything can be marketing. But at the same time various phenomena that intuitively seem to be marketing tasks are missing on the map of the marketing discipline.

This section inquires into empirical and scholarly support of Fisk’s thesis that marketing is everybody’s business by analyzing how the discipline described its fundamental “business” over time and the consequences of respective historical decisions.

This section describes the methods applied to develop this theory of marketing. Instead of repeating methodological discourses about the salient dichotomies of quantitative versus qualitative data and inductive versus deductive methods or reproducing the infamous argument of rigor versus relevance, we will concentrate on epistemological beliefs, critical methodological decisions, and the design of four non-representative empirical studies.

The following sections draw on the above historical analysis, the ancient requirements for a comprehensive theory of marketing, and our extensive critique of the discipline to evolve a social systems theory of marketing. Utilizing the methods mentioned above and Luhmannian theory of social systems as a key interpretive framework, the sections develop a coherent and empirically valid description of marketing. Having analyzed the problems of prior approaches, we chose to describe marketing as a social system, and communication about and through brands as their basic operation. We define “preferences towards a brand versus no preferences towards a brand” as the fundamental code marketing systems use to distinguish themselves from their environments. Unlike other authors, we place the medium of brands in the center of the theory.

This section draws on the requirements towards a theory of marketing mentioned above which scholars suggested over the last six decades, to reflect on the theoretical contribution of our theory of marketing. Subsequently, we discuss how this theory fulfills its own requirements.

The goal of this thesis was to advance the theory of marketing project with a conceptual framework that allows for a theoretically and empirically consistent description of marketing as a societal phenomenon, considers all practical and theoretical interests associated with the marketing notion, and provides consistent conceptual means for observation and self-reflection.