Making marketers accountable:a failure of marketing education?

The academic/practitioner divide in marketing is very evident in marketers’ real world problems of accountability. Empirical research reported in this paper reveals senior non‐marketers perceive marketers to be “unaccountable, untouchable, slippery and expensive” and this is further reflected in the domain literature. Exploration of the issues raises questions about whether marketing educators have failed to deliver the theory and frameworks that could address this problem. Since the 1960s, many tools have been developed and used by marketing educators, academic researchers and consultants that should have helped practitioners to become more accountable; yet something appears to have gone wrong. This paper synthesizes the most recent literature in these areas, contends that accountability is imperative to avoid the marginalization of marketers and proposes an agenda for further research to close the academic/practitioner divide.