Blue Print of a General Theory – Marketing Literature Review

Any disciplines, to some degree can bring human beings inspiration or even lead the direction of other disciplines to advance within a certain period (according to the research finding of B.M. Kedlov, a Russian philosopher, early 70s). To resume such great social and academic responsibility, marketing discipline must establish its own general theory and systematically connected theories system. However, until now: 1, except of criteria of a general theory (Hunt, 1973; Bartels, 1970), no more clear clue is suggested on how to develop a marketing general theory; the criteria of a general theory itself is questionable; 2, we still don’t clearly know what an overall system of marketing theories looks like and what the relationship among them is; 3, no general summary is developed to inspire marketers that what we can learn from the existing divergences in marketing academics and how we synthesize them into a more advanced theory, and what the strategic planning for marketing theory development is.