Perspective Shifts in Marketing: Toward a Paradigm Change?

The aim of this contribution is to discuss the evolution of marketing, arguing whether it is accomplishing a paradigm change. Starting from previous definitions of paradigm, we adopt the viable systems approach (vSa) as a general interpretation key useful for interpreting the evolution of marketing over the last few decades. Through the lens of the vSa structure-system approach, which suggests distinguishing between a structure-based view and a systems-based view, we discuss the contribution of the most relevant theoretical and practical proposals to marketing theory advances in the last few decades, recognizing their scientific positioning and the theoretical connections linking them within a whole framework. The evolutionary pathway traced by the different marketing theoretical and practical approaches defines a series of phase passages characterized by progressive shifts in perspective that have led researchers to focus first on goods, then on relationship, and, more recently, on service as a general rule of market exchange. Well known as a shift from a goods-dominant to a service-dominant logic, this passage, started thanks to the relationship marketing proposal, reflects, from a vSa perspective, a wider evolution from a reductionist toward a systems view that seems to lead to a service-based systems view of market exchange.