Marketing Response 1 - Amanda Li

Is marketing an art or a science? This is honestly a question to me that seems moot to the point. The point of marketing is to reach a consumer base and to ultimately become as customer-oriented as possible to gain profits. Marketing is a means to an end for the ultimate goal, with that being profit. Where marketing is classified is only important to those in academia who want to attempt an understanding of a concept that spans too many disciplines to classify. In seeking to classify such a complex subject, we delve into the dark abyss of the philosophical debate over the definition of words and what we as a society have come to accept. However, if we were to think about marketing critically and set caveats in the discussion, we would reach the conclusion that while marketing could be both an art or science, it leans more towards being an art.

Marketing is a relativist subject that has many paradigms as a result of its populace, which includes everyone. Art is something that everyone is exposed to every day and is interpreted differently. Marketing is the same thing. It reaches a large audience because it is intended in that way. Like art, marketing sends subliminal messages to people, and those messages are sent in different ways that are then interpreted by its audience in whatever way their perceptions allow them to. Art is also an application of technical processes, and in many of the ways, those are the core actions of marketing. Quantitative descriptions of art are the only real way to describe art, and it is also the most descriptive way to describe marketing.

While this subject displays significant factors of being an art, some aspects of science are included that are vital to the function of marketing. While marketing does rely heavily on quantitative factors, and those are impossible to be objective about, the qualitative evidence is also crucial. Surveys are deployed to millions of people from a variety of companies and those report back with numbers representing the preferences people hold. Marketers do research and conduct experiments to come up with theories that apply to the markets on a greater scale. These are then adapted to cultural preferences of different places, but in using a version of the scientific method, this claims one of the tenets of science. Because marketing also weaves the theories of the different disciplines of social sciences and then applies them to marketing, it adopts part of the scientific status of their sister principles. However, to achieve the status of being a fully fledged science, marketing has not attained nearly enough of the tenets, especially considering its modern day connotations.

Do we even need this to be a science? Nowadays, the view on science has been increasingly negative. The atomic bomb and genetic modifications have been hailed as one of the many wonders of science. However, the moral implications of science have been negated. In marketing, that is something that cannot be allowed. The entirety of marketing is reaching out to a consumer base and spreading subliminal messages from the companies, so in that effect, it is more similar to art than a science. There are always going to be aspects of science in marketing because there will always be research and data that goes into the different theories that are constructed. However, marketing will always be more of an art than a science.