Principles involving marketing policies: An empirical assessment

We examined nine marketing textbooks, published since 1927, to see if they contained useful marketing principles. Four doctoral students found 566 normative statements about pricing, product, place, or promotion in these texts. None of these statements were supported by empirical evidence. Four raters agreed on only twenty of these 566 statements as providing meaningful principles. Twenty marketing professors rated whether the twenty meaningful principles were correct, supported by empirical evidence, useful, or surprising. None met all the criteria. Nine were judged to be nearly as correct when their wording was reversed.The authors thank the many people who commented on early drafts, including Eileen Bridges, Fred Collopy, Douglas Dalrymple, Alan Dubinsky, Andrew Ehrenberg, Jonathan Freeman, Raymond Hubbard, William Perreault, William Ross, Steven Schnaars, and Gerald Zaltman. Jennifer L. Armstrong, Gina Bloom, and Phan Lam provided editorial assistance.