The malpractice of marketing management

Abstract

PurposeTo draw lessons from Peter Ducker's change of heart during the half‐century between The Practice of Management in 1954 and his death in 2005.Design/methodology/approachCommissioned for the viewpoint series, with permission to think aloud.FindingsConcludes that marketing managers and marketing academics should consider their social and cultural role as “citizen professionals”, and the responsibilities that implies. Instead of talking vaguely about paradigm shifts, they should re‐think the future in the context of all‐too‐evident “discontinuity” (Drucker) and “disruption” (Fukuyama), and beware of “epistemopathology” (Thomas). The alternative is malpractice and mismanagement.Practical implicationsMarketing practitioners may need to be educated into a radically different conceptual framework for the new century.Originality/valueDraws attention to an unquestioned guru's latter‐day questioning of the very role of “management” in society, and proposes practical lessons for marketing management in the future.