Marketing as a science

From time to time, marketing people get into controversy as to whether or not marketing is a science or an art. The student of marketing will do well, therefore, to clarify, at the start, the distinction between a science and an art.
The word "science" refers to an organized body of knowledge by means of which it is possible to establish cause and effect relationships. For example, we say that two parts of hydrogen and one part of oxygen, combined in a certain manner, make what we know popularly as water. Thus, H20 stands for water everywhere and at all times. In chemistry, we have many such formulas or established relationships. We know that every time we combine certain chemicals with certain other chemicals we get the same results.
An art, on the other hand, is a branch of skilled learning involving certain techniques but lacking the certainty of cause and effect. For example, suppose we want to sell ten-thousand apples. We suspect that, if we 1 educe the price by five per cent, we may increase sales by ten per cent or more. But there is no certainty of this. Actually, in some instances, sales have increased when price was raised. In other situations, sales have decreased when price was reduced.
This inability to predict with any degree of certainty how the consumer will react prevents marketing from being a science. Of course, there are many techniques in marketing which, in effect, employ the scientific method. But until it is possible to say that a given number of dollars spent in a certain way will always produce a given volume of sales, we cannot speak of marketing as a science.
Marketing deals with the consumer, and the consumer's wants and desires. These cannot be predicted from one moment to the next because a large share of all buying is impulsive, personal, subjective, and individual. The combination of two colors in a necktie may appeal to one group of men, and repulse another group. Or the same combination may repulse the first group at another time. Why? There often is no known identifiable reason. Hence, in marketing there do not exist, in all instances, scientific causal relationships. We cannot say that the same conditions will always produce the same results.