Editorial
Journal of Marketing
Challenging the Boundaries of Marketing
Christine Moorman, Harald J. van Heerde, C. Page Moreau,
and Robert W. Palmatier
The technological and digital revolutions experienced over
recent decades have fundamentally transformed marketing
practice, consumer behavior, and competitive dynamics and
presented new policy and societal challenges. At the same time,
the world’s many economic, social, and political problems can
benefit from proactive, purpose-driven marketing thought. On
this stage of dynamic change and unprecedented opportunity,
the marketing discipline is poised to offer new knowledge that
contributes to the full range of marketing stakeholders, includ-
ing the students we educate.
Despite this potential, a great deal of marketing scholarship
remains safely within the confines of its present boundaries—
relying on mainstream assumptions, theories, and methods that
tend to reinforce, not challenge, our thinking. Like most scien-
tific communities, marketing has the trappings of Kuhn’s
(1962, p. 5) “normal science,” which “is predicated on the
assumption that the scientific community knows what the
world is like,” a “willingness to defend that assumption, if
necessary at considerable cost,” and a tendency to suppress
novelties “subversive of its basic commitments.”
There are many reasons for this inertia. Institutional and
individual rewards are tilted toward incremental research that
safely builds programmatic streams for tenure while a risk-
averse journal review process can easily stamp out innovation.
Given these forces, many early-career marketing scholars oper-
ate within the safe boundaries of the discipline while pledging
to return to innovative opportunities in the later stages of their
careers. Unfortunately, most never do.
It is within this context that we introduce a series of inno-
vative articles designed to inform and inspire research that
broadens the current boundaries of marketing, including the
phenomena, theories, methods, and findings the field considers
important and interesting. Articles in this series include con-
ceptual reexaminations that challenge assumptions in well-
established research areas. These articles do so by questioning
current boundaries and offering fresh research agendas. Other
articles highlight new challenges to the field by offering con-
ceptual frameworks to structure new research approaches with
the potential to transform the discipline.
The first of these “Challenging the Boundaries of
Marketing” articles appears in the current issue and focuses
2019, Vol. 83(5) 1-4
ª American Marketing Association 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/0022242919867086
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on “Marketing in the Sharing Economy” (Eckhardt et al.
2019). We asked this team of authors to investigate the chang-
ing nature of marketing in the sharing economy—a critical
perspective that has been missing from most research published
in marketing journals. Defining the sharing economy as a scal-
able socioeconomic system that employs technology-enabled
platforms to provide users with temporary access to tangible
and intangible resources that may be crowdsourced, the paper
examines how the sharing economy forces us to rethink three
foundations of marketing: institutions (e.g., consumers, firms
and channels, regulators), processes (e.g., innovation, brands,
customer experience, value appropriation), and value creation
(e.g., value for consumers, value for firms, value for society).
Importantly, the article offers wide-ranging future research
opportunities that confront the boundaries of marketing
thought.
These authors, Giana Eckhardt, Mark Houston, Baojun
Jiang, Cait Lamberton, Aric Rindfleisch, and Georgios Zervas,
examine the sharing economy from remarkably diverse per-
spectives and methodological approaches, representing mar-
keting strategy, empirical modeling, analytic modeling,
mainstream consumer research, and consumer cultural theory.
This interdisciplinary perspective reinforces the Journal of
Marketing’s (JM’s) position as the discipline’s broadest and
most inclusive journal and reflects our view that the discipline
will be stronger when we unite to solve the field’s most press-
ing questions and problems. Consistent with this view, the
second article in the series, “Uniting the Tribes: Using Text
for Marketing Insight,” is coauthored by Jonah Berger, Ashlee
Christine Moorman is Editor in Chief of JM and T. Austin Finch Sr. Professor of
Business Administration, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, USA
(email: moorman@duke.edu). Harald J. van Heerde is Editor of JM; SHARP
Research Professor of Marketing, University of New South Wales, Australia;
and Extramural Fellow, Tilburg University, the Netherlands (email:
h.vanheerde@unsw.edu.au). C. Page Moreau is Editor of JM and John R.
Nevin is Professor of Marketing and Executive Director of the Center for
Brand and Product Management, Wisconsin School of Business, University of
Wisconsin-Madison, USA (email: page.moreau@wisc.edu). Robert W.
Palmatier is Editor of JM and Professor of Marketing, and John C. Narver
Chair of Business Administration, Foster School of Business, University of
Washington, USA (email: palmatrw@uw.edu).
2 Journal of Marketing 83(5)
Humpreys, Stephan Ludwig, Wendy Moe, Oded Netzer, and
David Schweidel. This article, which will be published in a
forthcoming issue, offers a conceptual framework for thinking
about text, provides practical pointers for researchers working
in this domain, and presents an agenda designed to drive text-
based research across the discipline. In doing so, the article
encourages scholars to challenge their own methodological
boundaries by providing the guidance to do so.
Why Challenge the Boundaries of Marketing
Now?
The need to think outside the box is especially important now
because the practice of marketing is changing faster than the
research published in marketing journals. The rapid rise of big
data, the sharing economy, influencer marketing, privacy con-
cerns, and social media challenge marketing to produce more
knowledge faster while also creating fundamental concerns
about marketing’s ability to contribute to the world. To meet
these challenges, we think the field needs to pull off its blin-
ders and uncover new ways of thinking about marketing and
the marketplace.
As noted, forces internal to marketing academia limit the
innovativeness of our thinking and the problems we address.
These include (1) training silos that keep us focused on similar
problems, methods, and theories over time; (2) the self-limiting
tendency to read the same journals, attend the same confer-
ences, and invite like-minded seminar speakers so that knowl-
edge tends to conform—not to challenge; and (3) beliefs about
what are considered the boundaries of marketing or what con-
stitutes “theory” or “rigor” by many reviewers and editors. It is
easy to see how we might all become a bit stuck.
Let’s not become sea squirts. World-renowned neuroscien-
tist Llinás (2001) observed that this marine animal begins life
as an active creature with a 300-neuron-sized brain. However,
after swimming around during its early life, the sea squirt
ultimately attaches itself to the ocean floor, where it happily
stays for the remainder of its life. Remarkably, in the absence
of the need to wander and explore, it has no use for its brain
and eats it!
The “Challenging the Boundaries” series is intended to keep
us “wandering” as a means to combat these inertial tendencies.
Simply, we seek to promote innovation, diversify thinking, and
expand the scope of research in marketing in order to beat
down the forces of Kuhn’s (1962) normal science. We intend
for this series to challenge the assumptions, metaphors, and
ideas about what marketing is or is not and promote a better
set of ideas and approaches for what it might become. If we do
not take up this challenge, we will be absorbed—or eaten—by
other disciplines that are increasingly focused on important
marketing issues, such as computer science, economics, psy-
chology, and strategy.
The “Challenging the Boundaries” series will sometimes
include comments from practitioners or nonmarketing aca-
demics that will deepen and extend the contribution of the
articles to push the discipline toward new ideas. For example,
the commentaries on “Marketing and the Sharing Economy”
are offered by Yubo Chen (Senior Associate Dean, Professor,
and Director of the Center for Internet Development and Gov-
ernance at the School of Economics and Management, Tsin-
ghua University); Liantao (Tarry) Wang (Co-founder and Chief
Operating Officer of Xiaozhu); and Arun Sundararajan (Harald
Price Professor of Entrepreneurship and Professor of Technol-
ogy, Operations and Statistics, Stern School of Business, New
York University).
JM’s Role in Challenging the Boundaries
of Marketing
The editorial mission of JM is to “develop and disseminate
knowledge about real-world marketing questions useful to
scholars, educators, managers, policy makers, consumers, and
other societal stakeholders around the world.” Since its found-
ing in 1936, JM has played a significant role in shaping the
content and boundaries of the marketing discipline. The
“Challenging the Boundaries” initiative is an excellent fit with
JM’s historical role in the discipline.
The series also fulfills our current editorial mission to
emphasize innovation (Moorman et al. 2018) and to “challenge
the boundaries of the marketing discipline by publishing arti-
cles that advance new research questions designed to disrupt
traditional marketing doctrine and to open up new areas of the
discipline.”1 By encouraging teams of scholars to work on
high-risk, high-impact papers, we hope to increase the preva-
lence of these papers in the marketing discipline. A dedicated
process that relies on a rigorous and multitiered review process
(as the authors will attest) will help overcome the tendency of
these papers to struggle in the review process as they challenge
the forces of inertia. Our approach places two bets that we think
are important in the development of marketing thought.
Betting on the Value of “Strange Bedfellow” Author
Teams
Our approach reflects a commitment to a diverse and inclusive
approach to knowledge development. We believe that a “big
tent” is the best way to generate thought-changing marketing
ideas. Breadth may not seem like a wise strategy in an era of
academic specialization. However, we think diversity is a
strength because it creates cross-fertilization opportunities that
form the basis of innovative ideas. Breadth is especially impor-
tant given the interdisciplinary nature of most marketing prob-
lems. We hope this initiative proves that marketing benefits
when we work together—not stay in our camps.
1
See https://www.ama.org/guiding-editorial-principles-for-the-journal-of-
marketing/.
Moorman et al.
100%
90%
Percentage of All JM Articles That
80%
70%
Are Conceptual
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018
Figure 1. Conceptual articles published in JM (2000–2018).
Notes: “From the Editor” articles and book reviews were not included in the total count of articles or conceptual articles.
Betting on the Value of Conceptual Papers
This will be a series of conceptual articles. Wide-ranging, field-
defining concepts have been published in JM over the last 50
years. These include brand communities, brand equity, cus-
tomer equity, customer loyalty, customer value, internet retail-
ing, market orientation, the marketing–finance interface and
market-based assets, service dominant logic, service quality,
social marketing, and trust and relationship marketing. These
articles have produced rich, new streams of research that often
disrupted and redirected marketing thought in important ways.
Consistent with our approach, JM has published more con-
ceptual papers than the other premier marketing journals.
Unfortunately, fewer conceptual papers have been published
in the field overall and in JM in the last decade (see Figure 1
and Yadav [2010]). This initiative is an attempt to counteract
this trend. Beyond this initiative, we encourage authors to sub-
mit conceptual papers that offer new frameworks to JM
because these papers are often critical engines for exploring
new ideas and parts of the marketing discipline.
Process for Challenging the Boundaries’
Initiative
To start the series, we have tasked several diverse sets of scho-
lars to collaborate on these articles. As the team who developed
the “Marketing in the Sharing Economy” article exemplifies,
scholars coming from different methodological backgrounds
and different research orientations are united by a substantive
area. When these unique perspectives collide in the develop-
ment process, we think they have more potential to move the
boundaries of the field.
To seed this initiative, our editorial team identified both the
topics and the team members for the initial papers in the series.
However, our goal is to inspire teams of scholars to self-
organize, propose, and develop important articles that
challenge the boundaries of the field. To this end, we have
established a clear process for submitting topics along with the
criteria that will guide our approval decisions.
3
Submitting Proposals
We anticipate room for multiple new “Challenging the
Boundaries” articles during the remaining years of our tenure
as editors. Given that such articles take approximately a year to
develop, we would like to have all proposals submitted
between now and January 2021. Interested teams should submit
a three- to five-page proposal that establishes the importance of
the topic, how they intend to challenge the boundaries, and why
it is ripe for inclusion in the series. Proposals should describe
the team members and make the case for their breadth, diver-
sity, and expertise. Importantly, the proposal should also con-
tain statements about the team members’ willingness to work
together and commit to the article. Proposals should be sent to
the Editor in Chief.
Selecting Proposals
The JM editors, with the assistance of our Advisory Board, will
select the proposals to be developed into articles and sent into
the review process. Three primary criteria will be used for
making our selections. First, the topic should be one that a large
number of people in the discipline would or should care about.
The topic should come from one of the two tails of the innova-
tiveness spectrum—it should focus on a topic that is com-
pletely new to the field or on one that is well-worn,
entrenched, and in need of a jump-start. Ideally, the topic will
be an area of marketing undergoing significant change and
where academic research is lagging behind real-world market-
ing practice. The topic should be big enough and broad enough
to offer considerable research opportunities to a range of scho-
lars in the discipline, and it should be one that can be examined
from multiple perspectives (e.g., consumer, firm, market, pol-
icy, and society).
Second, the proposal should describe how the article will
challenge the boundaries in the field. Why is the topic ripe for
exploration and dismantling? What future research areas will
the paper explore with fresh insights? This latter point is
important because it underscores that these are not review
4 Journal of Marketing 83(5)
articles. Although an assessment and integration of what we
know can be fertile ground for innovation, the authors will
have to plant seeds for future research when they develop the
proposal into a submission. We seek thought leadership. The
“Marketing in the Sharing Economy” article in this issue
exemplifies the focus on new ideas by devoting over half of
its content to future research directions.
Third, the proposed teams should comprise three to five
members from different disciplinary and methodological tradi-
tions. We think diverse perspectives will produce the most
interesting and compelling research directions. As you design
your team, think about the strongest team members around the
world—not your close working associates. Furthermore, you
should ensure that team members will work hard to generate
the strongest manuscript. Because such large-scale conceptual
papers are very difficult to write, success demands that team
members commit to the process of working together and to
regular meetings. All other JM submission criteria will apply
as well.
Using these criteria, with this editorial, we open the process
for submissions. Importantly, there is no guarantee that these
articles will be published. Teams will have to produce an
important article that truly does challenge the boundaries.
Expert reviewers across multiple rounds will help us make this
determination.
Success Indicators
The “Challenging the Boundaries” initiative has already required
a great deal of valuable resources—namely, the time, effort, and
expertise of contributing authors, reviewers, and editors. It also
occupies important real estate in the journal itself. Because of
these considerable investments, we have established a set of
indicators to help us gauge the success of this series. The effec-
tiveness of these articles at seeding new topic areas, methods, and
cross-disciplinary respect and collaboration will be measured by
the scholarly interest the articles generate, especially among
younger members in the field, as indicated by article downloads,
article citations, and inclusion in doctoral seminars.
Conclusion
The sea squirt reminds us that a certain amount of wandering is
necessary to keep our disciplinary thinking fresh and relevant.
To that end, the goal of this series is to foster exploration of
marketing’s current boundaries. We are taking these first steps
together as a team with the hope that marketing can rise up to
more effectively meet its challenges and to live up to its poten-
tial for greater impact. We think it is fitting that JM leads on
this front, and we look forward to watching the reverberations.
If we can spawn just a little innovation through this initiative,
we will accomplish much.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Ruth Bolton, Rajesh Chandy, Don Lehmann, John
Lynch, and Jerry Zaltman for comments on a previous version of
this editorial.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to
the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.
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