Journal of Marketing Management

Marketer Behaviour: New Directions for a Socially Real Field of Research

At its most basic, marketing is a hybrid, a fusion of marketing theories, marketing devices and – crucially – marketing practitioners. Without marketers, marketing is merely a set of concepts and techniques. With marketers, these entities are ‘put to work’ (Mason et al., 2015) and take observable shape as an applied and effecting business discipline. Inevitably, marketing becomes both theoretically and socially constructed with marketers the primary arbiters of how theories are embedded as praxis (Ardley & Quinn, 2014; Palmer & Ponsonby, 2002). What marketers think, and how marketers behave, are thus fundamental to how marketing is both performed and perceived.

This vignette, adapted slightly for brevity, is taken from a 2022 article from Journal of Marketing Management on the subject of Marketer Behaviour (Woodall & Hiller, 2022, pp. 1369-1370). That article encapsulates our motivations for this special issue and gives, also, insights into our concerns for the ongoing status of the marketer constituency. We believe that the marketing discipline has frequently overlooked the roles and functions of marketing practitioners – the people behind the practice of marketing – and intend this special issue to be a fertile terrain for novel research in this emerging area.

Marketing work within organisations is typically a complex set of activities that is the responsibility of groups of individuals with job titles and duties organized hierarchically or within networks (e.g., Gebhardt et al., 2006; Homburg & Pflesser 2000; Kirca et al., 2005; Kohli & Jaworski 1990; Narver & Slater 1990). It typically involves various actors and tasks, including market research, consumer insight generation, user experience design, R&D, advertising, branding, distribution, and pricing, among others (Cook, 2006; Dávila, 2002; Moor, 2008; Zwick & Cayla 2011). Yet marketing can also be a more streamlined and even an ad hoc practice. Consider the small business owner, for whom the task of marketing might come without title and be enmeshed in their daily tasks of running their business (e.g., Chaston, 2014; Fillis, 2010). But whether they be in organizations large or small, it is the people within marketing, performing these various functions, and through their use of and interactions with technologies and marketing tools, who shape and give definition to markets and consumer culture. To know how marketing is both performed and perceived, it is fundamental that we learn more about what marketers think, how they behave, what they do, and the outcomes they produce (Woodall & Hillier 2022; Zwick & Cayla 2011).

Zwick and Cayla (2011) observed in respect of marketers that, “a limited but growing contingent of social scientists have begun to turn their gaze on the behaviour of this particular profession” (p. 6), but whilst the substance of marketer behaviour is sometimes addressed, it is rarely the core focus of scholars’ attention, nor has it been developed as a substantive field of inquiry. Moreover, much of the research in marketing that emphasizes the individuals within the practice is more focused on the effects that marketers have rather than the effecting that they do in their job functions (see, for example, Cook 2006; Woodall & Hiller 2022; Zwick & Cayla 2011). To wit, scholarship with some emphasis on the marketer is more likely to be categorized as ‘critical marketing’ (e.g., Gurrieri, 2012; Nilsson, 2019), marketing strategy (Ardley, 2005; Brower & Nath, 2018; Griffith an&d Hoppner, 2013), neuroscience (Bagozzi, 2018), marketing communications (e.g., Hartnett et al. 2016), and market research (Diaz Ruiz & Holmlund, 2017). Though these examples bear witness to the existence of that “gaze” (Zwick & Cayla, 2011) across myriad categories in marketing, and we note that although there is an emergent field of sorts, it has not noticeably grown. No term has been consistently deployed to represent that work or to ‘join the dots’ between differing aspects of different marketers’ worlds. It is into this gap that Woodall and Hillier (2022) brought the term Marketer Behaviour (see also Bloom & Dholakia, 1973; Hill, 2017; Zwick & Cayla, 2011), and which we hope to extend and develop through the contributions to this special issue.

In this proposed special issue, we seek to stimulate ideas, generate debate and promote collaborations around a body of work under the nascent ‘marketer behaviour’ banner; on marketers, their behaviours, thoughts, actions, and the outcomes of these. Our primary aim is to bring together work that exemplifies marketers’ behaviour and to further the objective of making the study of marketer behaviour a recognised field and established field of research in marketing. We acknowledge the fluid boundaries and identities that pertain to who is a marketer – be they Chief Marketing Officer, Marketing Associate or Manager, Strategic Marketing Manager, Brand Manager, Marketing Research, Entrepreneur, Advertising Executive, Copywriter, or many other roles besides. Under given circumstances, consumers can also be marketers (e.g. Rokka, 2021; Kotler & Levy, 1973) and even be part of a wider biopolitical project (e.g. Zwick & Bradshaw, 2016). We suggest, overall, that irrespective of how marketing – and the concomitant role of the marketer – emerge (e.g. Elhajjar, 2024), understanding how the relationship between these two associated entities is forged – and how it impacts both social and institutional domains - is key to establishing that ultimate relationship that develops between organisations and consumers. We hope that through the various contributions, we will build towards a better definition of who the marketer is, and what the marketer does, and intend for this special issue to be the start of a journey, not the end.

Suggested topics

We invite conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions that explore the phenomenon of the marketer and various aspects of their behaviours.

For a comprehensive description of the suggested topics, the reference list, plus Woodall and Hiller’s (2022) proposal for what constitutes the marketer and their four main areas of inquiry: 1) marketer character and identity, 2) marketer ethics and values, 3) marketer culture and context; and 4) marketer knowledge and understanding, please visit the full call for papers at the JMM Blog: https://www.jmmnews.com/marketer-behaviour/