The purpose of this paper is to examine a paradox in the
marketing literature. This paradox concerns the commodity
approach to marketing research. On the one hand, the com
modity approach is perceived as obsolete. Few marketing
journals or textbooks refer to it as a marketing research
method. On the other hand, commodity based papers are
still prominent in the marketing literature. Industrial pro
ducts and the marketing of services are still the focus of a
substantial amount of research. In order to empirically in
vestigate the actual status of the commodity approach in
scholarly marketing research, this paper presents a content
analysis of articles appearing in the Journal of Marketing
(1936-1989) and the AMA Proceedings (1957-1989). The
goal of the content analysis is to measure how the adoption
rate of the commodity approach has evolved over the past
54 years. Is
the commodity approach as obsolete as it is
perceived to be? Results show that (1) the adoption rate of
the commodity approach is cyclical, (2) different com
modities are studied more frequently in each of these cycles,
and (3) current papers are more theoretical and less descrip
tive than earlier papers adopting the commodity approach.
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