Art of Marketing - Sabrina Chan

The debate on whether marketing is an art or a science has been around since about 1945.  Marketing, according to the American Marketing Association, is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society.  The debate is mostly about the how.  How people come up with conclusions or potential theories in or about marketing.  And how the procedure determines whether marketing is an art or science.  Marketing does not have the same characteristics that other sciences have in terms of the hows.  Therefore, marketing is an art that has the potential to become a science. 

            Marketing is an art because people need to understand human behavior in order to create products or have services that adhere to customers’ preferences or catch their attention.  “The art of marketing is the technical, professional, applicative aspect of the subject,” (Bartels 322).  This implies that the execution of marketing is more emphasized than the knowledge of it.  Even though marketing skills and information are taught to students and workers, being able to use what was learned and execute it to gain a profit is a different story and is more important.  According to Hutchinson, marketing is an art because the conceptual domain of it is for profit, micro, and normative.  Marketing’s goal is to earn more profit, whether it be in the form of money or something else.  Micro means the marketing of individual units, such as firms and organizations, while normative represents what those units “ought to be or ought to do” (Hunt 20).  Marketing is already considered an art.  The question is, is marketing ready to be a science? 

            If marketing is to become a science, it needs to be more research based and not as restricted.  As mentioned previously, marketing as an art is for profit, micro, and normative.  As a science, it would need to include other dimensions: nonprofit, macro, and positive.  Laws, principles, and theories need to be created for marketing in order for it to be a science.  These are based off of facts that are generated through observations which are extracted from experiments or tests.  The only problem is that observations are always vulnerable to measurement error.  This signifies that theories also have the same issue.  Since marketing is a social science, it is difficult to cultivate experiments to test out a certain hypothesis.  Everyone is different due to their backgrounds, personalities, experiences, etc.  Finding a theory that applies to everyone is not possible and according to the scientific method, if an occurrence proves a theory to be wrong, majority of the process needs to be repeated.  So, while the scientific theory does not work for marketing, it can be adjusted to match marketing.  Currently, marketing cannot be considered as a science.

Although marketing is already considered as an art, that does not mean that it does not have the potential to also be a science.  As an art, it is micro, normative, and for profit.  However, to be a science, it needs to expand and adapt.  My main questions are: Why does marketing need to be declared as a science for it to be a science?  Why can’t marketing be an art and a science?