been largely unproductive. For the most part, we attribute
the current confusion to the somewhat naive
conceptions of science that have informed the controversy.
In particular, we consider the typical beliefs
about how scientists do scientific work and how scientific
progress is achieved to be inconsistent with
current views about such issues in the disciplines of
philosophy, sociology, and history of science. That
is, in asking, "Is marketing a science?," marketing
scholars have been comparing theory development and
testing in marketing to inappropriate standards which
have little to do with the conduct of scientific inquiry
in any field.
This article presents a relatively new and more
useful conception of science than has been considered
to date in the debates regarding marketing's scientific
status. To do so, we turn the tables in this long-standing
debate by asking the more fundamental and interesting
question, "Is science marketing?" In this article
we consider whether science can be effectively
analyzed as a special case of marketing-the marketing
of ideas.