A critical responsibility of marketing managers is to make normative and positive propositions about the organization's marketing mix. Normative propositions entail what an organization should do such as what changes should be made to a product, how a marketing communications program should be structured, or how to more effectively work with a channel member. Positive propositions deal with what is true about an organization or the markets it serves such as "Our product is of lesser quality than our competitors," "Our sales force is better than our competitors," or, "Our advertising is...

This second volume of Critical Thinking for Marketers expands your background knowledge of other areas of critical thinking that are making major contributions to both marketing as a social science and marketing as an applied science. Section I, Think Better, provides introductory discussions of - marketing as a science; the difference between correlation and causation; the meaning of what a "concept" is and why it is critical for marketers to develop good concept definitions (e.g., "What is customer satisfaction?"); why the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume is relevant to...