How It Was Built

Method

Design principles. The table was built design-first rather than data-first. Three rules were fixed before any content was placed. First, the unit of analysis is a construct, not an author, because leading scholars typically span several streams and an author-based map cannot show a stream's evolution. Second, both axes must carry theoretical meaning, in contrast to multidimensional scaling or co-citation maps whose dimensions are statistical artifacts. Third, the whole table must fit on one page so that it can be read holistically, which capped the grid at 18 columns and 7 rows and imposed a one-construct-per-cell rule. The accompanying Family Deep Dives sub-tables apply these same design principles, periodization, and classification rules to map the evolution of each individual stream.

Time periods. Rows are eras. The first row gathers foundational work through 1969, and each subsequent row is a decade. Decades were used rather than empirically identified breakpoints to ensure transparent and reproducible periodization. Each era was then labeled by its dominant preoccupation as evidenced by the constructs that fell into it: Foundations, Planning, Competitive Advantage, Orientation and Relationships, Assets and Accountability, Engagement and Networks, and Frontier. The labels were assigned after placement, not before, so that they describe rather than steer the content.

Families. Columns are research families. The 18 families were derived by consolidating the domain statements of marketing strategy (Hunt, 2018; Morgan et al., 2019; Varadarajan, 2010) with the streams that recur across the field's major reviews and handbooks. Two criteria governed inclusion: a family had to have a recognizable stream of scholarship in the top marketing journals spanning at least three eras, and it had to be distinguishable from adjacent families by its focal construct rather than by method or context. Streams that failed the second criterion were merged (for example, advertising, pricing, and promotion research into Marketing Programs). Families were then ordered so that neighboring columns are substantively related, which is what allows the column groupings to be read as regions of the table.

Clusters. The seven groupings across the top (Strategic Choice, Resources and Orientation, Organization and Programs, Customer and Brand Assets, Interfirm Networks, Context, Outcomes) are meta-domains that reflect the logic of a strategy: choices made, resources drawn on, organization and programs that execute, assets created with customers, exchange partners beyond the firm, the environment in which all this occurs, and the performance consequences. Each family was assigned to exactly one cluster, and the ordering of clusters left to right follows that logic from choice to outcome.

Blocks and color. Cell color marks the strategy domain and follows Morgan et al. (2019), who partition marketing strategy research into formulation and implementation, each with content and process components. These four blocks (FC, FP, IC, IP) cover strategy itself. Three further blocks were needed for constructs that Morgan et al. (2019) locate outside the strategy decision proper but that the field treats as core: Inputs (resources, capabilities, and market-based assets), Outputs (performance and customer outcomes), and Environment (market and technological context). Each construct was assigned to the block that best describes what the anchor works study. The block code is printed in every cell so that the classification survives grayscale reproduction.

Anchor works and inclusion. Each cell names one to three anchor works, chosen as the works a researcher or, for example, a doctoral student should read first to enter the stream: typically, the defining conceptual statement and, where one exists, the landmark empirical test. Anchors had to be published in leading journals in marketing; in the leading journals of adjacent fields, for constructs that entered marketing from those fields; in the Harvard Business Review during the foundational era, when the field's own journals were few and much of its formative thinking on segmentation, the product life cycle, the marketing concept, and global markets first appeared there; or as a foundational book. When two works define a stream, both are listed alphabetically. Every anchor was verified against the original source, and the full list, with accessible links, lives in the References section of this site. How anchors were selected, step by step, is set out in Anchor Selection in Detail.

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Institutional Foundations: Twenty Leading Contributors

Of the 445 recorded institutions, these twenty have the most author works among anchor works published between 1950 and 2021. Author works sum each affiliated author's anchor works, so a paper co-authored by two colleagues counts twice; Authors counts each person once under their recorded primary affiliation. Inclusion in the list is decided by author works, while the list is shown ranked by authors by default; select either column heading to re-rank it.

Twenty institutions with the most author works, ranked by distinct authors by default and sortable by either column
#	Institution	Country
1	Harvard Business School	United States	55	26
2	Arizona State University	United States	38	17
3	Michigan State University	United States	60	13
3	Texas A&M University	United States	40	13
3	University of Michigan	United States	38	13
6	University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)	United States	35	12
7	University of Texas at Austin	United States	23	11
8	University of Maryland	United States	35	10
9	Indiana University	United States	37	9
9	University of Southern California	United States	26	9
9	Babson College	United States	25	9
12	University of Groningen	Netherlands	20	8
13	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	United States	30	7
13	Colorado State University	United States	27	7
15	Auburn University	United States	20	6
15	Dartmouth College	United States	18	6
17	University of Washington	United States	27	5
17	Duke University	United States	22	5
17	Texas Tech University	United States	20	5
17	University of Mannheim	Germany	18	5

Source: author-affiliation data, October 2026. Equal counts share a rank. Affiliations are current primary institutions, or retirement/death affiliations where applicable, and some are provisional. Counts describe representation in this dataset, not research quality, historical institutional credit, or endorsement.

Influence tiers. The three-pip marks (landmark, major, emerging or specialized) are the judgments of a construct's influence on the field, informed by citation levels but not computed from them. Landmark denotes a construct that reorganized how the field thinks (market orientation, brand equity, commitment-trust). Major denotes a well-established stream with sustained work. Emerging or specialized denotes recent constructs or those influential mainly within a family. Because citation counts favor older work, a mechanical tier based on age-normalized citations is the natural replacement in future versions and for continuous research purposes, and the rule for doing so can be part of the deeper-dive validation agenda.

Imported theories. The detached series lists 18 theories from economics, sociology, psychology, and management that marketing strategy borrows rather than originates. Inclusion required that the theory be cited as the explanatory basis in the anchor works of at least one family, and that each theory be placed beneath the family it most directly feeds (transaction cost economics under channels and governance; the resource-based view under resources and capabilities). Theories developed within marketing were excluded from the series and placed in the grid.

Open positions and empty cells. The grid has 126 positions, of which 98 hold constructs. Seventeen positions in the first three eras are empty because the corresponding streams did not yet exist in the marketing literature (there was no supply chain research in marketing in the 1970s, no digital family before the 1990s). These are left blank rather than back-filled, because filling them would misrepresent when a stream began. The remaining 11 positions, all in the 2020s row, are marked as open frontier positions. For each, a prediction of the construct likely to occupy it was written by extending the family's trajectory through the prior two eras and identifying the current disruption most relevant to that trajectory, chiefly AI, platforms, privacy, and geopolitical fragmentation. These predictions are deliberately falsifiable: a later periodic-table version will either fill the cell with a construct that matches the prediction or record that it did not.

Interactive navigation and theoretical bridging. To operationalize the table for active scholarship, the platform pairs the curated taxonomy with structured retrieval instruments (the Research Advisor, the Theoretical Bridge, the Frontier Agenda, and Stream Traffic). Unlike generic, unconstrained language models that draw on unverified statistical text corpora, these tools execute closed-index retrieval strictly against the 869-cell repository, including functional block codes, influence tiers, and the 899 verified anchor works. Causal paths are evaluated across the functional block sequence (Inputs → Internal Processes/Capabilities → Outputs), candidate bridges are verified against empirical citation overlap, and returned recommendations are constrained by strict schema validation to prevent ungrounded construct attribution.

Technical infrastructure and AI-assisted curation. The Periodic Table of Marketing Strategy and its interactive analytical suite were human-curated and developed using Lovable's full-stack web engineering ecosystem (built on modern React, TanStack, and Tailwind CSS). Advanced large language models, including Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI architectures accessed via secured API gateways, served as high-effort research, reasoning, and synthesis partners during drafting and code orchestration. Crucially, the platform's research tools operate strictly against a closed, deterministic repository of 869 human-verified construct cells and 899 curated anchor references rather than ungrounded web retrieval. This hybrid infrastructure ensures every AI-assisted bridge, search, and conceptual linkage remains fully anchored in established marketing literature while maintaining strict scholarly provenance.

Stakeholder review and input. Development of Version 1.0 benefited from iterative review, classroom stress-testing, and interface feedback from approximately 120 individuals spanning undergraduate and master's students, doctoral candidates, faculty across assistant, associate, and full professor ranks, and business practitioners. Their input informed construct legibility, navigation ergonomics, educational utility, and the workflow of the interactive analytical tools.

The validation roadmap. Version 1.0 of the table is a curated map with explicit rules, not a bibliometric result, and the next version is the one that would change that. Three steps are on the roadmap. The first is to derive the families and streams from the data rather than from judgment: co-citation clustering to identify families, and main path analysis to trace each stream through the eras, on a defined corpus of the leading marketing journals. The second is independent placement: a broad cross-section panel of marketing strategy scholars assigning a sample of constructs to families and blocks without sight of the tables, with the agreement reported. The third is to replace the influence tiers with age-normalized citation tiers under a published rule, removing the one component that rests most heavily on research judgment. Each step applies to the Core Table and the Family Deep Dives on the same terms. Until then, the table stands as a proposal to the marketing-strategy field (and marketing at large), with the ownership note on the figure governing its use.

How the one to three works in each cell were chosen

Anchor Selection in Detail

The selection of anchor works was a rule-governed editorial process, not a citation formula. The rules are stated here in the order they were applied so that any cell can be checked against them.

Construct first, then works. Each cell was defined by a construct before any work was considered. The question for every cell was which work or works a scholar entering the stream should read first, not which papers in the family are most cited. Heavily cited papers that extend a construct rather than define it are therefore absent from the cells, and some lightly cited works that founded a stream are present.
Roles within the cell. Anchors fill defined roles, in this order: the defining conceptual statement, the work that named or framed the construct; the landmark empirical test or measurement, the work that made it operational; and the empirical generalization, meta-analysis, or integrative review, where the stream has one that changed how the field treats the construct. A cell with one anchor carries the first role; two or three anchors mean the later roles were filled. No cell carries more than three, and anchors are listed alphabetically so that the order does not rank them.
Corpus. A work had to appear in a defined set of outlets: the leading marketing journals; for each Family Deep Dive, the stream's own journals; the journals of adjacent fields for constructs that entered marketing from those fields; the Harvard Business Review and the management reviews for defining statements that first appeared there; or a foundational book. Many relevant works are excluded by this rule alone. It was applied in the same way to the author's own publications.
Era. An anchor's publication year falls within its cell's era. Where a stream's defining statement and its landmark test straddle two decades, they occupy two cells rather than one.
Influence as recognition, not as count. Citation levels were consulted as a check rather than used as a criterion: a candidate work had to be one the field's own reviews and syllabi treat as the entry point to its stream, and candidates that could not meet that test were replaced. No citation counts were computed, which is the reason the validation roadmap proposes replacing influence tiers with an age-normalized citation rule in a later version.
Tie-breaks. When two works could fill the same role, the earlier was preferred; then the one in a marketing outlet over one in an adjacent field; then the one the stream's own reviews cite as foundational. When the choice remained open, both were included, within the limit of three.
Deep dives. In each Family Deep Dive, the Core Table's own cells form the spine and keep their anchors, and may gain anchors under the deep dive's wider corpus. Other anchors are not reused across deep dives, so that each sub-table is complete on its own; the Learning and Knowledge deep dive, which cross-lists works from the capabilities, orientation, innovation, and digital families, is the stated exception. Tiers in a deep dive are judged within the stream rather than against the Core Table.
Verification. Every anchor was verified against CrossRef or the publisher for title, authors, year, volume, and pages, and each entry in the Master References links to the publisher page or, for books, to a retail listing. Entries that could not be verified were replaced. Verification confirms the bibliographic record; it does not validate the selection, which remains an editorial judgment offered for correction.