Knowledge Marketing: Issues and Prospects

The paper investigates the issue of “knowledge marketing”, which is increasingly important in the current economy where knowledge has become the direct or indirect object of economic exchange. In spite of this, theoretical and empirical studies that directly address the topic of knowledge marketing are still lacking. Some useful suggestions can be derived from two distinct fields. The first one is the knowledge management literature, which has however focused mainly on the efficient and effective management of internal knowledge and has only occasionally examined knowledge as a trading good. The second one is the marketing literature, which traditionally considers physical goods (especially consumer goods), and has only recently started to delve deeper into the marketing of services, which represents just a small step towards the consideration of knowledge as the object of economic exchange. Even though there are some useful elements that can be traced in the two literatures, these still need integrating in a consistent way. The aim of the paper is to conduct a critical analysis of the current studies for highlighting and discussing the main references that can represent a starting point of the formulation of “new” knowledge marketing approaches. In particular the paper analyses and discusses the following topics: a) knowledge as the object of economic exchange in markets; b) the marketing challenges faced by knowledge-intensive business services where knowledge is the vital ingredient of value creation for customers; c) the recent advancements in marketing, particularly the so-called “service-dominant logic” that considers the application of specialized knowledge as the fundamental object of economic exchange. Based on contributions in these fields, the paper attempts to delineate possible conceptual and methodological grounds of innovative approaches to knowledge marketing. These elements can represent the basis of a research agenda on new marketing approaches for knowledge-intensive companies.