Progress in Marketing Knowledge

By drawing on an empiricist tradition, and on the literature discussing the philosophical problems of marketing knowledge, we seek to develop practical guidelines for developing empirical generalisations. In particular we suggest three criteria for the development of marketing knowledge: ensuring falsifiability and theoretical competition; overcoming uncertainty through replication; and using extension to develop generalisations and identify boundary conditions. By way of demonstration, these criteria are applied to assessments of the Dirichlet model, the Servqual instrument, and market share modelling. We conclude with renewed plea that more of the academic research effort in marketing be devoted to replicating and extending existing results, and determining the conditions under which existing theories do, and do not, hold. Correspondence should be addressed to Malcolm Wright at: Marketing Science Centre, University of South Australia GPO Box 2471, Adelaide, South Australia 5001 AUSTRALIA Email [email protected] The authors would like to thank two anonymous JEMS referees for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.