Marketing-as-practice : A framework and research agenda for value-creating marketing activity

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Marketing-as-practice : A framework and research agenda for value-creating marketing activity © The Author(s) 2022 Published version Skålén, Per; Cova, Bernard; Gummerus, Johanna; Sihvonen, Antti Skålén, P., Cova, B., Gummerus, J., & Sihvonen, A. (2023). Marketing-as-practice : A framework and research agenda for value-creating marketing activity. Marketing Theory, 23(2), 185-206. https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931221123949 2023 Standard Article Marketing Theory 2022, Vol. 0(0) 1–22 © The Author(s) 2022 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/14705931221123949 journals.sagepub.com/home/mtq Marketing-as-practice: A framework and research agenda for value-creating marketing activity Per Sk˚ al´ en Service Research Center, Karlstad University, Sweden Bernard Cova Kedge Business School, Marseille, France Johanna Gummerus Centre for Relationship Marketing and Service Management (CERS), Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland Antti Sihvonen Jyv¨ askyl¨ a University School of Business and Economics, Jyv¨ askyl¨ a, Finland Abstract This paper draws on practice theory and a review of practice theoretical studies in marketing, management, consumer, and markets research to advance our knowledge of marketing as a valuecreating activity within firms. Building on previous research, the paper contributes to the literature by advancing a Marketing-as-Practice (MAP) framework based on three key concepts: marketing practices, marketing practitioners, and marketing praxis. The structures and interrelationships between these key concepts are also outlined. The framework can be used to study value-creating marketing activities within firms as well as between firms and their stakeholders which is in line with the American Marketing Association’sdefinition of marketing. This paper also contributes by presenting a MAP research agenda to guide future research on value-creating marketing activity. Keywords Marketing activity, marketing practices, marketing practitioners, marketing praxis, practice theory, value creation Introduction In 2004, the American Marketing Association (AMA) introduced a new definition of marketing, according to which the concept refers to “…the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, Corresponding author: Per Sk˚ al´ en, Service Research Center, Karlstad University, Universitetsgatan 2, Karlstad SE-651 88, Sweden. Email: [email protected] clients, partners, and society at large.” 1 The fact that value-creating activity is highlighted in the AMA’sdefinition is hardly surprising, since academic research has a long tradition of studying how firms create value for customers and other stakeholders (Coviello et al., 2002;Ruekert et al., 1985). In particular, the vast literature on the strategic orientations taken toward markets (see, e.g., Kohli and Jaworski, 1990;Slater and Narver, 1995), customers (Arnold et al., 2011), and interactions (Ramani and Kumar, 2008) has depicted the nature of marketing activities and their value-creating implications. Adjacent to this body of literature, research on marketing organization (see overviews by Kozlenkova et al., 2014;Moorman and Day, 2016) has provided the field with insight into the resources and capabilities that companies draw on to conduct value-creating marketing activities. In their review of this body of research, Moorman and Day (2016:15–16) summarized prior studies in the following way: “An array of mechanisms [resources and capabilities] have been examined in the literature, all of which point to marketing actions that add value to the firm, including customerconnecting activities.”This approach reflects an enduring interest in marketing research to study how well the firm succeeds to capture value for itself through its activities in the form of financial returns (Brandenburger and Stuart, 1996) as well as to create customer value in the form of utility or benefit relative to sacrifices (Zeithaml et al., 2020). 2 This dominant strand of research in key marketing journals has provided us with a robust understanding of how and when different marketing approaches and functions facilitate value creation and capture. However, this research has focused on firm-level resources and capabilities rather than on value-creating activities per se. While some researchers have studied day-to-day value-creating marketing activity at the micro-level (see, e.g., Lien, 1997;Prus, 1989), their work remains an exception and has not extensively influenced the marketing discipline. The lack of attention to how everyday value-creating marketing activities are conducted in firms echoes a longstanding discussion within strategy research about the limits of focusing on resources when attempting to understand firm activity and performance. As Johnson et al. (2003: 7) point out “…much research from the resource-based view marginalizes the activities, managerial or otherwise, that go on in organizations. The questions of how valuable resources are built and how they generate superior returns are left undisturbed…” (see also Bromiley and Rau (2014) and Whittington (2006) for similar arguments). Following this train of thought, understanding how everyday marketing activities are conducted in firms to create value is crucial for two reasons. First, companies conduct marketing in unique ways, which may explain their respective competitive advantages (see, e.g., Fr¨ os´ en et al., 2016; Gebhardt et al., 2006). Accordingly, the value creation logics of firms might not be captured by aggregate-level constructs, such as resources, capabilities, or orientations, and therefore analyzing firm-specific activities can shed light on how, for example, value propositions are built in practice (Sk˚ al´ en et al., 2015a). Second, as the AMA definition of marketing points out, value-creating activities extend beyond the firm to the customers, clients, partners, and society, reminding us of the importance of analyzing value-creating activities that interlink the firm and its environment (Gummerus, 2013). To date, marketing has extensively focused on the conceptualizations and categorizations of the customer value in the form of utility or benefit relative to the sacrifices (see Zeithaml et al., 2020 for a recent review), a perspective that also we adopt. Although this body of research offers significant insights into how firm offerings and their characteristics are evaluated by customers, it is disjointed from firm everyday activities. How can we then understand a firm’s value-creating marketing activities? Morgan et al. (2019) argue that we can understand everyday marketing activities within firms by drawing on practice theory (Reckwitz, 2002;Schatzki, 1996,2019), which has become increasingly important perspective across business disciplines for studying everyday activities (Nicolini, 2011). Practice 2Marketing Theory 0(0) theory suggests that all types of activities may be understood in terms of practices, which are organized activities that people do on a regular basis (Reckwitz, 2002;Schatzki, 1996). While we follow Morgan et al’s (2019) suggestion to draw on practice theory, we also note that practice theory has largely neglected value, while marketing works suggest value to be an outcome of marketing practices (Arnould, 2014). Therefore, the general understanding of practices within practice theory needs to be cross-fertilized with the marketing discipline’s emphasis on value. Thus, instead of focusing on how our field tends to conceptualize and categorize value, we should investigate “how value is routinely created”(Arnould, 2014: 132) by marketing activities. Adopting practice theory in this way provides us with a set of concepts for analyzing and understanding (1) value-creating marketing activity within firms, (2) how and why marketers perform these activities and how they are shaped by them, and (3) how different types of value-creating marketing activities are linked within firms, as well as between the firm and its environment (Nicolini, 2011;Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki, 1996,2019;Shove et al., 2012). While practice theory is not foreign to marketing research, it has mainly been used to study consumers’activities (see, e.g., Epp et al., 2014;Schau et al., 2009) rather than marketers’activities within firms. The few studies that have adopted a practice theory lens to study marketing activity within firms have mainly focused on identifying the different activities that marketers carry out (see, e.g., Dibb et al., 2014;Venter et al., 2015). Hence, there is a paucity of research analyzing how and why value-creating marketing activities are conducted and how they are connected with other actors and the broader society at large. Thus, the application of practice theory to the study of valuecreating marketing activity has yet to fulfill its potential. To address this issue, our aim in this paper is to advance our understanding of value-creating marketing activity in firms by articulating a Marketing-as-Practice (MAP) framework and research agenda grounded in practice theory (similar to what has been done within strategy research and other business research disciplines). Based on our review of prior practice theoretical research, we contribute to the literature by outlining a MAP framework that consists of three key concepts— marketing practices,marketing practitioners, and marketing praxis—and describe the structures and interrelationships between them, as well as their relationship to value creation. The framework makes practice theory accessible to the members of the marketing research community, who can use it to generate thick descriptions of value-creating marketing activity. As shown by Dolbec et al. (2021), enabling theories such as practice theory, when properly introduced to and integrated with marketing, can advance research within the discipline by “bringing new conceptual insights to bear on a topic that has been discussed in prior literature”(p. 446)—value-creating marketing activity in our case. Such integration may also develop the enabling theory and (marketing) practice. Our framework also serves as a starting point for studying how marketing activities enable firms to create value for and with customers, clients, partners, and society at large along the lines of the AMA’s definition of marketing. The framework thus heeds the calls to develop a theory of how marketing is actually done by practitioners (Kumar, 2015;Moorman et al., 2019). The MAP research agenda that we outline is structured around our framework. We maintain that the agenda will help to guide future research on value-creating marketing activity within firms and the study of how firms’marketing activities create value for and with stakeholders. We articulate the MAP framework and research agenda in five steps. First, we explain practice theory in general. Second, we discuss practice theoretical research in the disciplines of management, markets-as-practice, and consumer research to glean potential insights transferrable to marketing. Third, we review the practice theoretical research in the field of marketing to chart the extant research. Fourth, building on the previous steps, we outline our MAP framework. Finally, we present the research agenda for future MAP research, as well as our conclusions and limitations. Sk˚ al´ en et al. 3 What is practice theory? Practice theory is a family of theories with a common focus on practices that facilitate our understanding of activity (Nicolini, 2011;Reckwitz, 2002;Schatzki, 1996;Shove et al., 2012). To distinguish practice theory from other theories of action, Reckwitz (2002) differentiated between three fundamental theoretical positions in the social sciences. The first position is based on the notion of “homo economicus,”and it assumes that activity is a function of decisions made by informed rational actors. The second position is based on the notion of “homo sociologicus”and holds that humans act in accordance with broad societally shared norms and values. Cultural theory, to which practice theory belongs, is the third and most recent position from which activity is understood. Cultural theories commonly assume that human activities are steered by the situated structures of knowledge constructed by a group of individuals. These structures both enable and constrain the activities and sensemaking processes of individuals belonging to the group. Reckwitz (2002) further suggests that different types of cultural theories treat and situate these locally constructed and shared structures of knowledge differently; as memory traces in the mind of individuals, as symbols embedded in texts, as intersubjective understandings ingrained in human interaction, or, as in the case of practice theory, as practices embedded in human activities. Reckwitz (2002: 249) defines a practice as “a routinized type of behavior,”whereas Schatzki (2019: 27, 1996: 89) views practices as “organized actions.”Synthesizing these two views, practices can thus be defined as organized activities routinely carried out by a group of people, such as marketers in a firm. Practices are the things people commonly do, but they are not carried out exactly the same way every time. Practices can therefore be understood as shared templates (indicating how activities are, can, and should be carried out) that provide guidelines for activities as well as the performance of activities that such templates prescribe (Schatzki, 1996,2019). To further help us articulate our MAP framework and research agenda, we turn to a review of practice theory studies within management, markets-as-practice, and consumer research. Thereafter, we outline how practice theory has been used in prior marketing research and how value, which practice theory is silent on, has been addressed in this research. Practice theory in management, markets-as-practice, and consumer research Practice theory has been extensively used to study activity in several business disciplines (Nicolini, 2011), and here we isolate three research fields that are adjacent to marketing. First, we focus on strategy-as-practice (hereafter SAP), which is a vibrant research stream in management (Golsorkhi et al., 2015) that according to Morgan et al. (2019) can provide the basis for articulating a practice theory research agenda for strategic marketing. Second, markets-as-practice research has drawn on practice theory to understand the socio-technical construction of markets and how marketers shape markets through their activities (Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2007a). Finally, we turn to the field of consumer research, specifically consumer culture theory (Arnould and Thompson, 2005), which has long mobilized practice theory in its exploration of a broad range of market-related activities. We will draw upon these three fields to build our MAP framework and research agenda below. In his field-defining article, Whittington (2006) argued that SAP treats strategy as an activity people do, in contrast to traditional strategy research, which considers it to be something that organizations have. In the introductory chapter of the Cambridge Handbook of Strategy-asPractice,Golsorkhi et al. (2015: 1) suggest the following: 4Marketing Theory 0(0) Strategy as practice can be regarded as an alternative to the mainstream strategy research via its attempt to shift attention away from a “mere”focus on the effects of strategies on performance alone to a more comprehensive, in-depth analysis of what actually takes place in strategy formulation, planning and implementation and other activities that deal with the thinking and doing of strategy. By putting these ideas into action, SAP researchers have advanced both the theory and practice of strategy. For example, SAP researchers have studied different strategy practices, such as strategy meetings, workshops, and committees (see Vaara and Whittington, 2012 for an overview), investigated the role these practices have in strategy work, and outlined under what circumstances different practices generate performance (Golsorkhi et al., 2015). Furthermore, researchers have explored how strategy professionals’job characteristics change as the business environment becomes increasingly turbulent (Whittington et al., 2017) and which practices impede or promote participation in strategy work (Mantere and Vaara, 2008). In addition, SAP researchers have examined how strategy tools, such as PowerPoint (Kaplan, 2011) and strategy concepts (Jalonen et al., 2018), influence strategy making. The research on markets-as-practice (Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2007a) views markets as constantly becoming rather than merely existing. This field owes much to the work of Callon (1998), who has suggested that markets—rather than simply being a given—are socio-technical constructions involving the practices of various types of expertise and calculative agencies, including marketing expertise and agencies. According to Araujo (2007: 221), researchers should therefore “learn to speak of ‘markets’and ‘marketing practices’in the plural rather than attempt to squash a series of heterogeneous practices under a single label.” Within markets-as-practice research, practice theory has been used to outline how practices shape markets (Araujo and Kjellberg, 2009;Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2006) and to explore the interactive and iterative process of market shaping (Harrison and Kjellberg, 2016). For example, Pantzar and Ruckenstein (2015: 106) focus on the heterogeneity of “emergent practices in which people engage to construct and perhaps also problematize markets.”Practice theory has also been used to study stability and changes in markets. An exemplary study is that by Hawa et al. (2020), who showed that, through practicing, a market actor might maintain and change the market through purposive intent (i.e., replicating accepted practices) or incremental alteration of its perspective (i.e., changing actions over time through the development of new norms, habits, and meanings). Similarly, Dolbec et al. (in press) show how market evolution implies expansion of practices. In consumer research, the use of practice theory has been expanding ever since Warde (2005) formulated a research agenda for examining consumption activities from a practice theoretical perspective. This article paved the way for theorizing consumption by seeing consumers as practitioners engaged in mundane everyday activities of consumption and studying the central role—the “affordance”—that the material environment, made up of objects, tools, devices, and other apparatus, has in these activities (Halkier et al., 2011;Magaudda, 2011). Consumer culture theorists in particular have increasingly used practice theory (Arnould and Thompson, 2005)to understand how, for example, domestic activities are transformed into rituals and habits (Arsel and Bean, 2013), recreational activities are performed to legitimate consumers’sense of belonging to a community of practice (Thomas et al., 2013), and external shocks influence practices (Phipps and Ozanne, 2017). Simultaneously, practice theory has been brought to bear on the situational and contextually bound nature of consumption (Askegaard and Linnet, 2011), locating patterns of domestic activities of consumption within broader systems of provision (Rinkinen et al., 2019). Going beyond the mapping of different micro-practices enacted by consumers, consumer research has woven together practices by considering their uses and effects. From this perspective, the Sk˚ al´ en et al. 5 study by Schau et al. (2009) has been particularly influential due to its capacity to reveal how key practices are integrated to cocreate value in brand communities. Holt (1995) used a similar approach in categorizing consumption into the activities of accounting, assimilating, evaluating, and appreciating. Practice theory has also been used to study change toward sustainable consumption practices (Sahakian and Wilhite, 2014), and how members soothe tensions within brand communities through the frame alignment of practices (Thomas et al., 2013). Thus, a practice-based approach has illuminated how connections between marketplace cultures that revolve around broad interests—whether they be brands, aesthetics, or other shared passions—are held together as complex yet recognizable entities. To conclude, research on consumption, markets, and strategy has been shaped by the publication of three pioneering articles—Warde (2005) on consumption, Kjellberg and Helgesson (2007a) on markets, and Whittington (2006) on strategy—that have established frameworks accompanied by research agendas for practice theoretical research in these disciplines. These articles have in turn inspired a plethora of research that has examined relevant activities using practice theory, and which has contributed to institutionalizing the study of practices as legitimate research fields within management, consumer, and markets research. Following from this, other disciplines are also seeing attempts to create such foundational articles aiming to institutionalize the study of practices, such as Entrepreneurship-as-Practice (EaP) in the field of entrepreneurship (Champenois et al., 2020). Review of existing practice theory research in marketing This section provides a review of the scarce prior research that has used practice theory to study marketing activity in firms. In total, we identified 13 relevant articles, which are summarized in Table 1. The Appendix to this paper describes how the literature review was performed. Most of the articles in our review are devoted to identifying practices that marketing practitioners enact (with which we mean embrace and commit to) to carry out or perform marketing activities, and in doing so, they present lists of such practices (Browne et al., 2014;Cayla and Penaloza, 2012; Ch´ avez, 2012;Dibb et al., 2014;Gebhart et al., 2019;Gross and Laamanen, 2018;Kowalkowski et al., 2012;Sk˚ al´ en et al., 2015a,2015b). However, only two of the studies (Ots and Nyilasy, 2017; Venter et al., 2015) focus exclusively on the marketing department, where an important part of a firm’s marketing activity takes place. Toward this aim, Venter et al. (2015) describe how marketing practitioners conduct market segmentation through the practices of legitimizing, embodying, contextualizing, and maintaining market segmentation. Several studies have focused on identifying practices performed by marketers to create value (Gebhardt et al., 2019;Gross and Laamanen, 2018;Kowalkowski et al., 2012;Sk˚ al´ en 2015a, 2015b). For example, Sk˚ al´ en et al. (2015a) list practices that help compose value propositions that marketers and other actors draw on to cocreate value. This focus on how practices create value is in line with the AMA’sdefinition of marketing in terms of firms creating value for their stakeholders and society at large through marketing activity. Some of the reviewed studies have also described the elements that make up practices in general and value-creating practices in particular. The ethnographic study of integrated marketing communication (IMC) practices by Ots and Nyilasy (2017) shows how IMC practices are constituted by routines, material set ups, rules and procedures, cultural templates, and teleoaffective structures (i.e., structures pertaining to emotionally charged goals). Similarly, Kowalkowski et al. (2012; see also Sk˚ al´ en et al., 2015b) show that “cocreative practices”are made up of procedures (i.e., rules), understandings (i.e., know-how), and engagements (i.e., emotionally charged goals) that marketing practitioners draw on to create value by forming value propositions. 6Marketing Theory 0(0) Table 1. Summary of the reviewed practice-theory-informed marketing articles. Author(s) year Context Findings Kjellberg and Helgesson (2007b) Retailing: Marketing managers Studies the change from full-service to self-service in retailing; identifies exchange, normalizing and representational practices to understand the studied change; and discusses how these three practices mutually shape one another Cayla and Penaloza (2012) Advertising agencies and brand managers Uses practice theory to show how the organizational identity of the brand managers studied is built up by practices; illuminates how practices impede learning and adaptation; identifies several practices, such as market research exercises, client-agency meetings, training sessions, and seminars Ch´ avez (2012) Advertising agencies and practitioners Studies Hispanic advertising agencies and analyzes practices with which they isolate Latinos from other consumers to create a distinctive market. The study also shows how the identified practices can limit access to capital Kowalkowski et al. (2012) Retailing: Marketing managers, other employees, and consumers Finds that forming a value proposition by marketers, consumers, and other employees is underpinned by three elements of practices: (1) procedures, (2) understandings, and (3) engagements. It also finds that forming a value proposition is characterized by four types of activities: (1) applying, (2) assessing, (3) adapting, and (4) adopting Dibb et al. (2014) Multiple: Marketing practitioners and educators Finds that academics and practitioners agree that essential marketing practices are about: (1) stakeholder and relationship marketing, (2) customer analysis, (3) marketing mix, (4) management/marketing planning, and (5) the centrality of customers. The paper clarifies the scope of marketing practice Browne et al. (2014) Retailing: Middle marketing managers Studies how middle marketing managers adapt to top managers through three practices: (1) sensing, (2) challenging, and (3) transmitting Sk˚ al´ en et al. (2015a) Multiple: Marketers, other employees, and customers Identifies three aggregates of practices and 10 practices used by marketers and other stakeholders to conduct service innovation by creating value propositions: (1) provision practices (i.e., operating practices, problemfinding practices, and problem-solving practices), (2) representational practices (i.e., naming and labeling practices, modeling practices, and interaction practices), and (3) management and organizational practices (i.e., organizing practices, staffing and team building practices, networking practices, and knowledge-sharing practices) (continued) Sk˚ al´ en et al. 7 Table 1. (continued) Author(s) year Context Findings Sk˚ al´ en et al. (2015b) Car industry: Marketing managers and consumers Identifies three aggregates and eight practices that marketing managers and consumers enact to cocreate value: (1) interacting practices (e.g., questioning and answering, dialoguing, and translating), (2) identity practices (e.g., mirroring, praising, and branding), and (3) organizing practices (e.g., managing and governing); finds that the co-creation of value succeeds when the enactment of practices aligns, and that value cocreation fails when the enactment of practices misaligns. Marketers and consumers use realignment strategies to address the failure of value co-creation Venter et al. (2015) Multinational firm: Marketing managers Finds that marketers conduct market segmentation through four sets of actions or practices: (1) legitimizing, (2) embodying, (3) contextualizing, and (4) maintaining market segmentation; also finds that marketing theories and models are not followed strictly by marketing practitioners Drumwright and Kamal (2016) Advertising agencies and practitioners Studies advertising practitioners in Middle East and North African countries to uncover macro-, meso-, and micro-level phenomena that influence advertising practitioner’s habitus in terms of ethics Ots and Nyilasy (2017) Retailing: Marketing managers Finds that integrated marketing communication (IMC) as a practice is constituted by routines, material set-ups, procedures, cultural templates, and teleoaffective structures; IMC is conceptualized as a set of value-creating integrative practices that aligns diverse behaviors and forms of knowledge Grossman and Laamanen (2018) IT firm: Marketing managers and other employees Identifies 13 shared knowledge constructs (see Table 5), which connect the things, actions, and valuecreating activities characteristic of marketing work and provide “a better understanding as to how the practitioners’professional knowledge, the ‘knowing how to do’, transpires in practice” (p. 118) Gebhardt et al. (2019) Multiple: Market intelligence directors and other employees Identifies five value-creating market intelligence dissemination practices: (1) distribution, (2) resource centralization, (3) consultative selling, (4) empathic learning, and (5) experiential learning (practices 1–3 contribute to reinforcing existing market schemas in firms, and practices 4–5 contribute to updating and changing market schemas in firms); suggests that intelligence directors need expertise on organizational learning and the ability to draft shared meaning structures 8Marketing Theory 0(0) Table 2. (continued) Focus of investigation General research questions Iterations of the research questions adapted to contemporary marketing issues Relationship between value-creating marketing activity within firms and their stakeholders What is the relationship between value-creating marketing activity in firms and the society at large (including customers, clients, and partners)? How are intraand extra-firm marketing practices, practitioners, and praxis linked? What are the antecedents to the alignment and misalignment of value-creating marketing activity between firms and their stakeholders? Under which conditions are alignment and misalignment likely to occur? How do marketing practitioners address this misalignment? What realignment strategies do they use? How do value-creating marketing practices, practitioners, and praxis enable the alignment and misalignment of value-creating marketing activity between firms and their stakeholders? Can the elements of marketing practices (i.e., procedures, understandings, engagements, and materials) explain such alignment and misalignment? How is a firm’s marketing strategy and its position on sustainability aligned or misaligned with external stakeholders, such as digital platforms that have their own rules and agendas? How do firms and their external stakeholders realign misaligned positions due to, for example, other actors’market shaping? When does (or does not) misalignment between actors inhibit value cocreation? How does the need for agility due to market changes, such as changing consumer behavior, influence marketing practices at different levels of the firm and within the marketing department? How does a firm’s market shaping efforts affect the marketing practices and practitioners of other firms and marketing intermediaries? Value-creating marketing activity beyond the firm Is it fruitful to study value-creating marketing activity beyond the firm by focusing on marketing practices, practitioners, and praxis? Do marketing practices consist of procedures, understandings, engagements, and materials across different contexts? How are marketing practices bundled in contexts beyond the firm? How are marketing practices linked across contexts? How can linkages between multiple types of actors (e.g., firms, customers, brand communities, public organizations, etc.) explain changes in marketing practices, practitioners, and praxis? How does alignment and misalignment between multiple types of actors contribute to our understanding of value cocreation and codestruction in the economy? How do marketing practices vary in contexts beyond the firm, such as influencer communities or digital platforms? How do the elements of value-creating marketing activities vary across contexts, such as subsistence marketplaces with little formalized marketing activity? How do different types of actors in a particular market change marketing strategies, sustainability activities, and the usage of technology? Sk˚ al´ en et al. 15 to big societal challenges, such as climate change or a prolonged pandemic, as seen during the past few years. Second, although the general relationships between the three key constructs of marketing practices, practitioners, and praxis (illustrated by arrows in Figure 1) are based on prior research, there is little research on how they interact simultaneously or develop together, particularly through elongated periods of time. One interesting theme for future research is the determination of which elements of practices that potentially hinder or complicate marketing praxis. Furthermore, we know little about how marketing practices shape the identity and sensemaking of marketing practitioners (see Gebhart et al., 2019, for an exception). Also, the change of marketing practices by marketing praxis remains an under-researched theme, with a few exceptions that still do not detail how and why these changes take place (see, e.g., Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2007b;Kowalkowski et al., 2012; Sk˚ al´ en et al., 2015a). Another related topic worth exploring is how marketing practices, practitioners, and praxis interact to induce change, including innovation, sustainable development, or shifts in strategy (Morgan et al., 2019). Third, our framework further highlights the relationship between value-creating marketing activity within firms and the society at large, and how this relationship can result in both value cocreation and codestruction. The relationship between the firm and its stakeholders that we propose (i.e., that alignment/misalignment between firms and its stakeholders can generate value cocreation/ codestruction) has only been explored in a few prior studies (Echeverri and Sk˚ al´ en, 2011,2021; Sk˚ al´ en et al., 2015b). Considering the evolving relationship between the alignment and misalignment of marketing practices and firm stakeholders, we need further research on this topic and how it changes marketing practices within firms, as well as the marketing praxis marketing practitioners carry out. A contemporary challenge for marketers stems from the new ways in which customers shop, which are often accompanied by an explosion of customer touchpoints and fast-changing competitive and technological dynamics that have led to an increased emphasis on agile marketing (Kalaignanam et al., 2021). This trend calls for investigations of how marketing practices facilitate or hinder agility, as well as an understanding of how marketing practitioners make sense of events, issues, and actions that are surprising or confusing for them. A further issue of contemporary relevance is that firms increasingly view markets as malleable and plastic systems that can be influenced. In the approach detailed by Nenonen et al. (2020), we see how the company is taking the initiative to shape the market by pushing other actors to change marketing practices. At the same time, while extant research has allowed us to develop a better understanding of the processes, tools, and positive outcomes of market shaping for those firms doing the shaping, little is known about the effects of market shaping on other firms’current marketing practices and marketing practitioners. Fourth, value-creating marketing activity is also conducted in contexts other than firms, such as in brand communities (Schau et al., 2009) and at marketing and cultural intermediaries (Diaz Ruiz and Kjellberg, 2020), as well as by actors loosely linked to the firm, such as micro-influencers. Moreover, studies on “marketing work”(Moeran, 2009;Svensson, 2007), an area that is adjacent to that of marketing practices, suggest that our focus on firms is limited. A key endeavor of future research would then be to investigate whether our framework may guide studies of marketing activity beyond the firm and how this could expend our definition of marketing. A hot contemporary marketing topic is the growing role of digital platforms and other technocultural actors. For example, Kozinets (2022) illustrates how the marketing praxis of firms and the needs of digital platforms misalign. Consequently, value is codestroyed, which is likely to contribute to a change in marketing practices, especially the community management practices of the 16 Marketing Theory 0(0) firm, and to adjustments of marketers’competencies. Hence, the increasing role of digital platforms offers interesting opportunities for further MAP research in contexts other than firms. Such a shift in focus would further illuminate the relationship between firms and their stakeholders’marketing activity. Table 2 presents our MAP research agenda. Conclusion In the opening of this paper, we argued that marketing scholars have attended to value-creating marketing activity in firms on an aggregate level and by focusing on resources and capabilities rather than on everyday marketing activities per se. We set out to outline a MAP framework (see Figure 1) and research agenda (see Table 2) based on practice theory that may be used to study value-creating marketing activity in firms and how these activities create value for firm stakeholders and the society at large. The MAP framework and the research agenda presented above are the key contributions of our paper. We invite future research to further contribute to the literature by extending the MAP framework outlined here and answering the questions raised in our research agenda. Declaration of conflicting interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study is supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (SAB21-0057) and Jan Wallanders och Tom Hedelius Stiftelse samt Tore Browaldhs Stiftelse (P18-0028). ORCID iDs Per Sk˚ al´ en https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2982-9651 Bernard Cova https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0459-5083 Notes 1. https://www.marketingstudyguide.com/amas-definition-marketing/ 2. As value is a complex concept, we use here this simple definition of customer value, and refer the reader to Zeithaml et al. (2020) for a more in-depth discussion. References Araujo, L. (2007) Markets, market-making and marketing. Marketing Theory 7(3): 211–226. Araujo, L. and Kjellberg, H. (2009) Shaping exchanges, performing markets: the study of market-ing practices. In: P Maclaran (ed) The SAGE Handbook of Marketing Theory. London, UK: Sage, 195–218. Arnold, TJ., Fang, EE., and Palmatier, RW. 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This fits well with our aim of providing an overview of this body of research from which a synthesizing framework and research agenda can be created. Our review focused on the most established marketing journals. We started the review process by inspecting the top 100 journals of the Web of Science business list as of January 2019 to identify journals that contained the word “marketing”in their title. This resulted in a set of 21 journals. The following journals were included in our review: Journal of Marketing,Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science,Journal of Interactive Marketing,Journal of Marketing Research,Industrial Marketing Management,Journal of International Marketing,Marketing Science,Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management,International Marketing Review,International Journal of Research in Marketing,Marketing Theory,Journal of Services Marketing,Journal of Marketing Management,Journal of Public Policy & Marketing,Journal of Vacation Marketing,Psychology and Marketing,Journal of Social Marketing,Journal of Macromarketing,Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing,European Journal of Marketing, and Marketing Intelligence & Planning. Later on, Consumption Markets & Culture was added to this list, following the suggestion of a reviewer, since it is a major outlet for practice theoretical work in marketing. We then searched for articles published between 1999 and 2020 in these journals using the search term “Practice theor*”(* to include articles that contained practice “-theory”,“-theories”,“-theoretical”, etc.) in “all text”. This resulted in a corpus of 123 articles. The year 1999 was chosen as the starting date for the review, since the broader use of practice theory in management, markets-aspractice, and consumer research began in the early 2000s (see, e.g., Johnsson et al., 2003;Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2006;Warde, 2005). Thus, the chosen time window was likely to capture key works in marketing that are informed by practice theory. In addition, some of the most cited practice theoretical works drawn on in marketing research were published just before or after 1999, such as the works by Schatzki (1996) and Reckwitz (2002). To make sure that the chosen timeline did not exclude relevant papers, the reference lists of the 123 articles were screened and additional relevant works were added to the list. With the aim of establishing inclusion and exclusion criteria for the final selection of papers, we read the abstracts, keywords, and references of the 18 articles published in the leading journal in the field, the Journal of Marketing. After the first round, we decided to include empirical, methodological, and conceptual papers that have contributed to improving the understanding of marketing activity in firms by drawing on practice theory. Papers that did not focus on firms, that did not use Sk˚ al´ en et al. 21 practice theory, that used practice theory merely on a linguistic level (i.e., mentioning practice theory without using it in the analysis and discussion), or that served as introductions to special issues were excluded. By applying these criteria, the original set of 18 Journal of Marketing articles was reduced to three. We divided the rest of the articles (105 articles) published in the remaining 21 marketing journals between us, applied the inclusion and exclusion criteria, and read the abstracts, keywords, and reference list. This reduced the list to 46 relevant articles. All these articles were read in detail by at least one of the authors. During this process, we also included 17 additional articles to our review that were not captured by our initial search but that were identified by reading the 105 articles and through other means. These articles were then added to the corpus, read, and reviewed in detail. This procedure resulted in a finalcorpusof13articlesthatusedpracticetheorytostudymarketing activity in firms. The contents of these key articles are described Table 1 and discussed in the fourth section of the article. The procedure also resulted in the identification of a parallel list of 42 articles that had been published in marketing journals but that did not focus on using practice theory to study marketing activity in firms. The bulk of these studies focused on consumption practices. Per Sk˚ al´ en is a Professor of Business Administration based at the Service Research Center, Karlstad University, Sweden. He is working within the research streams of transformative service research, service innovation, value codestruction, and critical marketing and organization studies as well as with applying practice theory, strategic action field theory, and other sociological theories to marketing research. His work has appeared in several journals including: Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Service Research, Marketing Theory, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, and Organization. Address: Service Research Center, Karlstad University, 65188 Karlstad, Sweden. [email: per.skale[email protected]] Bernard Cova is a full-time Professor of Marketing at Kedge Business School, Marseille, France. Ever since his first papers in the early 1990s, he has taken part in postmodern trends in consumer research and marketing. A pioneer in Consumer Culture Theory, his work on this topic has been published among others in the Journal of Consumer Research, the European Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Business Ethics, Marketing Theory and Organization. Address: Department of Marketing, Kedge Business School, Domaine de Luminy, BP 921, 13288 Marseille Cedex 9, France. [email: bernard.co[email protected]] Johanna Gummerus is Liikesivistysrahasto Associate Professor in Marketing at Hanken School of Economics in Finland, and Ander Visiting Professor at the Service Research Center, Karlstad University, Sweden. Her main research interests include the logics of value creation, the influence of technology on consumer-firm relationships, as well as service marketing and management in general. She has published in, e.g., Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Marketing Theory, Journal of Service Research, Journal of Service Management, and Journal of Business Ethics. Address: Department of Marketing/CERS, HANKEN School of Economics, PB 479, 00101 Helsinki, Finland. [email: johanna.gummerus@hanken.fi] Antti Sihvonen is a lecturer at Jyv¨ askyl¨ a University School of Business and Economics, University of Jyv¨ askyl¨ a, Finland. His research interests concentrate on the organizational and cultural processes of product and market development. His research has been published in journals such as Journal of Product Innovation Management, Journal of Retailing, Journal of Business Ethics, Marketing Theory, and Industrial Marketing Management. Address: Antti Sihvonen, University of Jyv¨ askyl¨ a, P.O. Box 35, 40014 University of Jyv¨ askyl¨ a, Finland. [email: antti.t.sihvonen@jyu.fi] 22 Marketing Theory 0(0)