Overview

Welcome to the Periodic Table of Marketing Strategy: an interactive, curated map of 98 constructs in 18 research families across seven eras, colored by strategy domain, tiered by influence, and anchored by the works that open each stream. Eighteen imported theories form a detached series, and eleven open positions in the 2020s point to where each family is headed. Together with 18 Family Deep Dives, the site gives doctoral seminars, researchers, and practitioners one place to see how the field evolved, how its streams connect, and where its next frontiers lie. Built by explicit curation rules rather than citation algorithms, it serves as a teaching frame, a positioning tool, and a falsifiable research agenda.

Chemistry has had a one-page map of its field since 1869 (Mendeleev, 1869, 1871). Mendeleev's periodic table did three things that no list of elements could do: it placed each element in a position determined by two meaningful dimensions, it made neighbors informative, and it predicted elements that had not yet been found (e.g., Jensen, 2005). Marketing strategy, a field with roughly seven decades of scholarship and a rich set of review articles, has no equivalent. The field has excellent domain statements (Hunt, 2018; Morgan et al., 2019; Varadarajan, 2010), histories of individual streams, and bibliometric maps of citation structure. What it has lacked is a single figure that a researcher, such as a doctoral student, can put on a wall and read as a whole: where the field's constructs sit relative to one another, how each stream developed, and where the gaps are. This site offers that figure twice over: as a downloadable one-page PDF for the wall (Wall poster, 36 × 24 in, print-ready PDF), and as an interactive table where you can filter by era and tier, isolate rows and columns, open any cell for its anchor works, and trace connections with the Resources tools.

The existing tools each solve part of this problem. Domain statements define what marketing strategy is and partition its research into components; Morgan et al. (2019), in particular, provide a defensible four-part structure of formulation and implementation, content, and process. But a partition is not a map; it says which box a construct belongs in, not how boxes relate or how their contents evolved. Reviews of individual streams, such as market orientation, customer engagement, or marketing capabilities, trace development over time but only within one stream, so the reader cannot see that, for example, the learning and innovation families matured a decade after market orientation and drew on it. Bibliometric maps built with multidimensional scaling or co-citation clustering (e.g., Chabowski, Mena, and Gonzalez-Padron, 2011; Chabowski, Samiee, and Hult, 2013) show relatedness across the whole field, but their axes are generally statistical artifacts with no theoretical meaning, and the picture changes with every corpus and every algorithm setting. A map that cannot be read without the analyst's key, and that will look different next year, is not a map a field can adopt.

The periodic metaphor suggests a way through, provided its limits are stated at the outset. Marketing strategy has no underlying natural law; constructs do not have atomic numbers, and no property recurs with mathematical periodicity. What transfers from Mendeleev is a design discipline rather than a theory: choose two axes that mean something, order the entries so that adjacency carries information, hold the whole to one page, and treat empty positions as predictions rather than omissions. Applied to marketing strategy, the axes become research families and eras; adjacency becomes the grouping of families into meta-domains; the one-page constraint forces a one-construct-per-cell rule; and the empty positions in the current decade become explicit statements about where the field's streams are headed as a research agenda.

This interactive website presents Version 1.0 of the core table, accompanied by family deep dives that expand each stream into its own sub-table. It places 98 constructs in 18 families across seven eras, colors each cell by its strategy domain, marks each construct's influence tier, names the one to three anchor works that open each stream, and sets 18 theories imported from adjacent fields in a detached series beneath the families they feed. Eleven positions in the 2020s row are left open, with a prediction of which construct is likely to fill each. Seventeen positions in the earliest eras are left blank because the corresponding streams did not yet exist.

Three uses motivate the periodic-table exercise. The first is doctoral education, where the table gives a seminar a shared frame: a student reading market-based assets can see at a glance that it sits between brand equity and marketing-finance, that it arrived in the 1990s, and that it draws on the resource-based view. The second is research positioning, where a new construct can be located by family, era, and block, and its neighbors identified as the literatures it must engage. The third is agenda setting, where the open positions state, in a form that can be checked later, what the field's streams imply about their own next step.

For managers, the same cells read as a decision aid. Every populated cell names the construct a firm is implicitly acting on, the anchor works that define it, and a short managerial implications paragraph that turns the stream into the choices a management team faces: which customers to serve, how to position, where to invest, and what to measure. The Research Advisor's business-problem mode extends the same logic to a live problem stated in a manager's own words, returning the five best-fitting cells and leading with the likely implications and the questions a management team should ask.

The table is a curated structure with explicit rules, not a bibliometric finding, and it is offered in that spirit. Every placement, anchor, and tier is a research judgment, and the table carries an ownership note to that effect so that anyone who uses or adapts it takes responsibility for verifying its contents. Where to go next: start with the Core Table on the home page, then open any of the 18 Family Deep Dives to see a column expanded into its own sub-table. Method explains how the eras, families, blocks, tiers, imported theories, and open positions were curated. Reading the Table walks through the layout across meta-domains and down families, and the patterns it reveals. Resources hosts the four research tools — the Research Advisor, the Theoretical Bridge, the Frontier Agenda, and Stream Traffic — which work across all 869 cells, along with the User Guide. References collects the 899 verified anchor works, and the Disclaimer sets out the tables’ appropriate use.