Marketing challenges in a connected world

In recent years, business environmental conditions are changing faster and faster, providing tremendous challenges to marketing practitioners, researchers, and teachers. A further concern faced by our discipline seems to be a weaker linkage between marketing scholarship and marketing practice, as well as the diminished influence of marketing in companies. On the former point, it is time that marketing research goes back to drive changes in marketing practice, as it did in the past. In view of that, our research reviewing process should try to foster the production of new ideas, more than incrementalism and endless validation. On the latter point, we are living a paradox. Marketers are being marginalized right now that the top management is finally recognizing that customers are the core asset of their firms, the only one that they cannot give up. The article is a virtual roundtable on these issues coordinated by Alessandro Arbore and Bruno Busacca with the contributions of professors Bernard Cova, Kevin Keller and Ivan Snehota.