Old and new approaches to marketing. The quest of their epistemological roots

Abstract

In recent years the marketing discipline faced a considerable increase in the number of approaches. Some of the new "labels" are probably just new names advertised to sell old products. But some may contain significant new issues that need to be identified and discussed. Do these new marketing denominations (viral, retro, vintage, postmodern, judo, tribal, buzz, and many more) identify distinctions on subjects being studied, without particular methodological implications, or rather, do new labels and new subjects imply orientations that start from different epistemological premises and involve different research methodologies? This paper try to investigate if the proliferation of labels related to alleged new methods of marketing analysis actually implies a distinctions of subjects being studied and different epistemological premises.marketing trends, marketing epistemology