Ehrenberg-Bass: Marketing needs to embrace its scientific status or risk a slow death
Unless marketers can embrace marketing as a ‘young science’ that needs to be nourished they will lose their influence at the top table, argues Professor Jenni Romaniuk.
Marketing is a young science that needs to be nurtured and nourished if the industry wants to enter an “age of enlightenment”, according to professor Jenni Romaniuk, associate director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science
Speaking today (10 October) at the Festival of Marketing, Romaniuk urged marketers to embrace marketing as science if they want to ensure the discipline has impact and influence within organisations and among consumers.
“With the changes marketing is facing with the C-suite and getting credibility with the board, can we afford to not take ourselves seriously as a marketing discipline?” asked Romaniuk.
“Can we afford to wait for that or will we just get rendered obsolete by the CFO in the company? We can move now and get there more quickly than if we have to wait for all of the people who don’t think marketing is a science to first die.”
Romaniuk argued that to enter an age of enlightenment, marketers need the humility to realise they can’t know everything about such a new science and some of their thinking may be wrong.
“If you think you know everything about how marketing works, unfortunately you are very misguided,” she stated. “We are, as a science, only in our infancy and have a lot to learn.”
Read the full article on Marketing Week.
