Introduction to the Special Issue on Marketing Within the Enterprise and Beyond

We are very pleased and gratified to introduce this special issue of Management Science, titled “Marketing Within the Enterprise and Beyond.” Marketing as an academic discipline has traditionally been closely linked with other disciplines such as economics, econometrics, and statistics; psychology; sociology; anthropology; and operations research. More recently, we have witnessed interfaces with the literatures in finance, accounting, information systems, supply chain management, etc. Marketing as a functional area within the organization is also increasingly more closely linked with other functional areas such as accounting, business strategy, finance, information systems, and operations. Finally, both researchers and practitioners have been interested in studying the public policy implications of marketing decisions. Marketing, because of both its very nature and its relative youth as an academic discipline, has been continually evolving. Our motivation for this special issue was to “take stock” of this evolution—especially in light of the various interactions and interfaces mentioned above. We felt that it would be important for both marketing and the aforementioned related disciplines to get a better feel for where we stand in this evolution. We readily confess to embarking on this path with considerable trepidation given the breadth of the topic as articulated. Strong support from two sources helped us commit ourselves to this undertaking. First and foremost, Richard Staelin, past president of the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science (ISMS), encouraged us and provided financial support for the issue from the Society. We are grateful to ISMS for its sponsorship of the issue. The second was Gerard Cachon, the editor of Management Science, who strongly believed that this endeavor would be valuable to the entire readership of the journal. Our trepidation seemed fully justified when the passage of the deadline yielded 154 submissions— a much bigger number than we had actually anticipated. Furthermore, the vast majority of the submissions arrived just before the deadline, severely straining the editorial process. Thus, this issue would not have been possible without the tireless efforts of Gerard Cachon and the department editors, associate editors, and reviewers across the various departments of Management Science. We sincerely thank them for their willingness to step in and step up. Finally, given the magnitude of the task, we needed someone to keep track of where we were and where we were headed and to ensure that the operation ran smoothly. For this, we thank Kathleen Luckey from the Management Science editorial office. What has come out of this process is what you see in front of you, 13 papers that span a wide spectrum of topics related to marketing, drawing from a diverse set of fields such as accounting and finance, economics, information systems, management, operations, and R&D. We are grateful to the authors of the papers for being responsive to the needs and deadlines of the special issue and for their willingness to tackle the comments of reviewers from multiple disciplines. We also thank the authors of all of the other papers that were submitted to the special issue, without whose participation this enterprise would not have been a success.