Fundamental Issues & Directions for Marketing

This paper discusses some fundamental issues for marketing in the new millennium as the organizing framework for this special issue. These issues also provided the framework for the MSI conference on this topic. The fundamental issues address the questions: 1) How do customers and consumers really behave? 2) How do markets function and evolve? 3) How do firms relate to their markets? 4) What are the contributions of marketing to organizational performance and societal welfare? The validity of these marketing issues is discussed and the relation to a similar issue identification effort in strategic management is considered. The second part of the paper deals with many of the apparent influences on the direction in which marketing seems headed. Influences such as: 1) the connected knowledge economy, 2) globalizing, converging, and consolidating industries, 3) fragmenting and frictionless markets, 4) demanding customers and consumers and their empowered behavior, and 5) adaptive organizations. The paper concludes with discussion of three important challenges facing academic marketing in the next few years. These challenges to academic marketing relate to continuing and emerging needs: 1) providing meaningful marketing measures, inferences, and calibration, 2) crossing boundaries and understanding functional interfaces, and 3) rethinking the role of theory.