Challenges and new research avenues in marketing science

This paper is a revised version of the key note speech which the author gave at the 1984 Annual Conference of the European Marketing Academy (EMAC). The author critically evaluates the contributions of marketing science with respect to practical relevance and managerial decision making. He diagnoses a number of substantial discrepancies between research efforts and adoption of marketing science models. Some causes for this situation are identified and new more comprehensive research avenues are proposed and discussed. It is the intention of the article to stimulate further discussion on these important issues. Necessarily, many statements in this position paper are based on subjective judgement and not validated in a scientific sense.