Rethinking the marketing discipline: Marketing as design science

Persistent challenges in the academic marketing field hinder the full realization of its value for both research and practice. Addressing these issues requires broadening the methodological repertoire and reconsidering the field’s underlying purpose. We argue that design science, with its focus on creating and evaluating solutions to real‑world problems, offers a valuable complementary paradigm that enriches and extends the existing research traditions in marketing. Viewing marketing through a design science lens shifts the emphasis from analyzing how things currently are to systematically developing how they should be. Providing a scientific answer to this normative question requires an abductive research process grounded in a pragmatic epistemology and supported by a creation‑oriented methodology in which researchers iteratively design, create, and test marketing interventions. Building on this foundation, we offer a conceptual reframing of marketing as a design‑oriented discipline aimed at enabling the scientific development of purposeful interventions. The manuscript further advances a theoretical contribution by outlining the structure, ingredients, and “recipe” of design theory in marketing. We also discuss the key challenges that arise when positioning marketing as a design science and what adopting such a perspective requires from the field. Methodologically, we introduce practical guidance to increase the feasibility and publishability of marketing as a design science. By embracing a design‑oriented approach, marketing scholars can move beyond diagnosing practitioner problems and shift from offering advice to creating actionable solutions that genuinely advance the field.