Thabang Moleko, Nadine Oosthuizen, Amanda Hlengwa, Matolwandile Mtotywa
Abstract
Marketing is one of the most versatile and context-sensitive fields within business management education (BME). With increasing global complexity driven by the rise of emerging markets, marketing must evolve to stay relevant. This study conducted a bibliometric analysis to examine the performance, conceptual, intellectual, and social structures of marketing over the past 50 years. 1,405 documents were extracted from the Web of Science (WoS) and analysed using Bibliometrix/Biblioshiny in R. The corpus comprised 70,246 citations, averaging 59.45 citations per document, indicating strong scholarly engagement. Authors such as Tadajewski and Hunt have shown consistent contributions over two decades. Vargo, Lusch, and Sheth made influential contributions between 2004 and 2020, coinciding with the rise of service-dominant logic and evolving marketing thought. Thematic mapping through co-word analysis revealed dominant clusters around marketing theory, relationship marketing, consumer behaviour, loyalty, and customer satisfaction. Earlier themes like trust and word of mouth have evolved toward political marketing and consumer behaviour, while customer satisfaction now aligns with sensory marketing and firm performance, indicating a shift toward experiential and outcome-driven research. Social structure analysis identified the United States and the United Kingdom as central scholarly hubs, with strong collaborations mainly with Australia, Germany, and China. These findings provide a comprehensive field map, help identify research gaps, and establish a future agenda. The study proposes a future agenda focused on transitioning from Western academic hegemony, improving South-South collaboration, and investigating geopolitics in knowledge production. It also calls for integrating emerging themes such as sustainability, digital marketing, and AI-driven consumer insights into new marketing models to enrich the discipline.