Is a general theory of marketing possible? If so, what would it look like? This article (1) briefly examines the nature of theory in marketing, (2) explores the characteristics of general theories in the philosophy of science, (3) proposes what a general theory of marketing would attempt to explain and predict, (4) delineates the structure of general theories, both in and of marketing, and (5) ...

Tomorrow’s marketing theory is best co-authored with its past, the history of marketing thought. The merits of this co-authoring are deeply rooted in the value this brings to marketing knowledge and the marketing discipline – conceptual, methodological, scientific and pedagogical value. The purpose of this contribution is to demonstrate the relationship between the history of marketing thought ...

Technology is creating customer choice, and choice is altering the marketplace. Gone are the days of the marketer as salesperson. Gone as well is marketing that tries to trick the customer into buying whatever the company makes. There is a new paradigm for marketing, a model that depends on the marketer's knowledge, experience, and ability to integrate the customer and the company. Six principl...

in an inbound hub network: case study in South Africa Honora Smith*, Daniel Cakebread, Maria Battarra, Ben Shelbourne, Naseem Cassim and Lindi Coetzee Mathematical Sciences, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK; School of Management, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK; National Health Laboratory Service, Johannesburg, South Africa; and Department of Molecular Medicin...

In retail, demographics are currently regarded as the most convenient base for successful personalized marketing. However, signs point to the dormant power of context recognition. While technologies that can sense the environment are advanced, questions such as what to sense and how to adapt context are largely unanswered. In this paper, we analyze the purchase context of a retail outlet and su...

We consider auctions of indivisible items to unit-demand bidders with budgets. This setting was suggested as an expressive model for single sponsored search auctions. Prior work presented mechanisms that compute bidder-optimal outcomes and are truthful for a restricted set of inputs, i.e., inputs in so-called general position. This condition is easily violated. We provide the first mechanism th...