By Helen Edwards, columnist at Marketing Week 

 

The best marketing practitioners develop strategies based on sound theory, but they are pragmatists when it comes to driving it through.

 

Two things make marketing difficult: theory and practice. Of the disciplines around the boardroom table it can be the stickiest in study and the thorniest in application.

What makes marketing theory so tormenting to grapple with is its diffuse and protean contextual backdrop: the swirling chaos of markets combined with mercurial human behaviour. Where are the enduring truths?