Art or science?: Fifty years of marketing debate¹

Fifty years after Converse's (1945) classic statement on the “art or science of marketing”, the debate has come full circle. The holy grail of Science has not been attained and its pursuit has not only served to alienate practitioners from academics, but it has also done enormous damage to our discipline. This paper traces the development of the great debate, discusses the damaging postmodern critique of western Science and concludes that, as an Art, marketing should be judged by appropriately aesthetic criteria.