Problembereich:
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The question what marketing is and what it should be has a long tradition. The issue traces back to Bartels (1951), Hutchinson (1952), and Stainton (1952) who started the long-sustaining discussion whether marketing is a science or not and hence should pursue scientific objectives or mere practical goals. Others like Kotler/Levy (1969) discussed the scope of marketing and, basing on the idea that marketing should be the discipline that deals with exchanges between institutions and ways how these exchanges could be triggered in a general sense, voted for a broad scope of the marketing discipline („Generic Marketing“). The eighties and nineties saw controversial discussions about the scientific underpinnings of marketing research – relativism or realism (Hunt 1991, 1993). In most of these issues there was no settlement. The result is a marketing discipline that often is perceived as being fragmented and is far from having one identity. Several authors addressed this phenomenon and delivered overviews of different paradigms, schools of thought, marketing interpretations or other forms of clusters within the discipline. Beholding the different approaches three aspects are striking: (1) There seems to be almost no agreement on the grouping of marketing scientists and their individual approaches to the discipline. (2) Most of the classification efforts are highly subjective, only few are derived by means of logic (e.g. the classification scheme of Hunt 1978, 1979, 1991), but none has an empirical base. (3) There is no empirically grounded information displayed on the actual importance of the different groups – certainly not all groups have the same importance for the marketing discipline.
These shortcomings point to the research questions of this project: Which schools of thought can be identified in marketing in an empirical way? What is their relative importance?
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