Understanding disruption through the marketing lens: foundations, frameworks and future directions

Abstract

Disruption, long treated in marketing scholarship as an episodic departure from equilibrium, has become a permanent feature of the competitive landscape. This study aims to lay the conceptual foundations for a marketing theory of persistent disruption, arguing that firms no longer experience disruption as isolated events with a clear before, during and after, but instead operate continuously within overlapping, interacting disruptive forces – technological, geopolitical, ecological and institutional. The authors first reconceptualize disruption itself, proposing that the conventional exogenous–endogenous binary be extended into a feedback system in which a firm’s response to one disruption becomes a source of disruption for others, with marketing positioned at the critical interface of this loop. Building on this, this study develops a triadic framework – sensing, seizing and shaping – to characterize marketing’s role under persistent disruption, showing that these capabilities are disrupted simultaneously rather than sequentially, and to introduce the Disruption–Marketing Response Matrix, a typology crossing disruption origin (endogenous/exogenous) with response domain (upstream/downstream) to identify underdeveloped theoretical territory. Drawing on the nine papers in this Special Issue, this study also develops an integrated five-stage marketing reinvention framework spanning disruption recognition, stakeholder engagement and agile operating models. The authors argue that emerging markets, with their institutional volatility and resource constraints, constitute an underutilized theoretical laboratory for understanding marketing under sustained disruption, and that new-age technologies (artificial intelligence [AI], generative AI, machine learning, extended reality, Internet of Things, robotics and blockchain) should be understood not as discretionary tools but as infrastructure that reconstitutes the marketing environment itself. Drawing on the nine contributions in this Special Issue, this study distills seven theoretical implications spanning the persistence of disruption, the feedback-based collapse of the exogenous–endogenous distinction, the simultaneous disruption of dynamic marketing capabilities, the diagnostic value of the Response Matrix, emerging markets as theory-generating contexts, technology as infrastructure and marketing’s expanding role in societal value creation. This conceptual study advances theory by proposing new constructs and frameworks for studying persistent disruption. It identifies opportunities for longitudinal research, measurement of market-shaping capability and greater integration of institutional theory and computational methods to advance marketing scholarship. This study presents a Disruption–Response Action Matrix that helps managers diagnose disruption types, assess sensing, seizing and shaping capabilities, prioritize capability investments and guide marketing reinvention under persistent disruption. The question facing academia and industry is not how to recover from disruption, but rather how to build the capabilities needed to function within it as a permanent condition, given disruption is shown to be becoming a constant phenomenon. Through this study (and this Special Issue), the authors offer that the aggregate effect of concurrent disruptions has created an environment that existing marketing theory does not fully cover. The authors see this as a call to develop new theoretical constructs that take the permanence of disruption as their starting point rather than their exception.