Failure: Perspectives and prospects in marketing and consumption theory

Failure is ubiquitous in popular and consumer culture. In this commentary, we interrogate discourses around failure and outline potential avenues of inquiry for the marketing and consumption theory disciplines. We begin by synthesizing how failure has hitherto been conceptualized in marketing theory. Then, we discuss how recent rethinking of failure in other disciplines can be meaningful for marketing thought, and propose a new agenda for marketing scholars for studying failure, that moves beyond studying failure as a primarily destructive phenomenon that arises predominantly in service encounters.