(c) Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode

Caution: this article is on academic research. If that isn’t your cup of tea, you could read my recent popular article on The CMO’s Playbook instead.

Context of this article

About three months ago, reading (again) Shelby Hunt’s “The nature and scope of marketing”, I decided to write to Prof. Hunt, not with any particular research question or objective, but to interact once with the great mind that could, in one sweeping paragraph, summarize all of marketing till then:

“During the past three decades, two controversies have overshadowed all others in the marketing literature. The first is the “Is marketing a science?” controversy sparked by an early JOURNAL OF MARKETING article by Converse entitled “The Development of a Science of Marketing.” Other prominent writers who fueled the debate included Bartels, Hutchinson, Baumol, Buzzell, Taylor, and Halbert. After raging throughout most of the ’50s and ’60s, the controversy has since waned. The waning may be more apparent than real, however, because many of the substantive issues underlying the marketing science controversy overlap with the more recent “nature of marketing” (broadening the concept of marketing) debate. Fundamental to both controversies are some radically different perspectives on the essential characteristics of both marketing and science.” (Hunt 1976, p. 17, emphasis added)

Reading this the first time, towards the end of the second year of my PhD, I was not impressed. But, having read and written and thought and analysed much, I start to sense in Hunt’s writing a comprehensiveness, clarity, and directness that was not visible to me earlier. To learn that the author of this writing is no longer with us and that the meeting I considered requesting (I even wondered which email address would Prof. Hunt be reachable at, since he had recently retired from his long-standing faculty position), left me with a sense of loss that I did not anticipate. This article is an attempt to understand why.