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Published in Marketing Letters, 4:3 (1992), 253-265

Principles Involving Marketing Policies: An Empirical Assessment

J. Scott Armstrong

The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104

Randall L. Schultz1

College of Business Administration, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242 [January 1993] Key words: Marketing Principles, Price, Product, Promotion, Place

Abstract

We examined nine marketing textbooks, published since 1927, to see if they contained useful marketing principles. Four doctoral students found 566 normative statements about pricing, product, place, or promotion in these texts. None of these stateinents were supported by empirical evidence. Four raters agreed on only twenty of these 566 statements as providing meaningful principles. Twenty marketing professors rated whether the twenty meaningful principles were correct, supported by empirical evidence, useful, or surprising. None met all the criteria. Nine were judged to be nearly as correct when their wording was reversed.

1. Introduction Does marketing contain a set of well-defined principles that can help managers to make better decisions? If so, are these principles communicated effectively? We assumed that the answer to the first question was ”yes,” and undertook a project to see how much progress has been made in developing marketing principles. Our goal was to develop an inventory of marketing principles and to see how this inventory changed over time. But in trying to develop this inventory, we were confronted by the second question, that is, the communication of knowledge. Thus, we sought to develop an inventory of the principles that are actually being communicated. As a working definition, we defined principles as normative statements that specify a condition followed by a suggested action. That is, marketing principles should provide operational guidelines, telling managers how to act in a given type of situation. An example of a principle is that the illustration...