Social Marketing: Are We Fiddling While Rome Burns? A Response to Andreasen and Wells

Andreasen's (this issue) and Wells’ (this issue) comments regarding my initial article (Goldberg, 1995) are both reasoned and thought provoking. Both endorse the need for marketers to consider applying their skills to issues that are problematic in our society today. The devil is in the details! First let me address Andreasen's comments. One of his primary concerns appears to be a cautionary note for young marketing scholars: Beware the temptation to address a social ill as the primary motivation for developing research. He argues that academics, and especially untenured academics, ought to be driven to explore “fundamental theoretical problems.” At the same time he suggests that there is ample opportunity to “advance fundamental knowledge while at the same time doing good” (Andreasen, this issue). Petty and Cacioppo (1996) made the same case, concluding with a plea to basic researchers to make their research more accessible to applied researchers and to the latter to become more sensitive to the potential of theory‐driven research. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to be the last time we hear this plea, unless some meaningful way of operationalizing it captures the imagination of at least a subset of consumer researchers.