Invited Commentary on Grönroos’ article: How to save marketing: let’s focus on the phenomenon. Marketing as being and doing: Re-grounding the phenomenon in social practice

This commentary responds to Christian Grönroos’s call to reorient marketing by grounding it in the phenomenon itself rather than in activity lists. We extend his provocation by arguing that marketing must be understood as an integrated being–doing phenomenon constituted through social practices, not as an abstract essence detached from what marketers, organizations, and customers actually do. Drawing from philosophical debates on essence and action, as well as practice-theoretical perspectives, we contend that marketing emerges through recurrent processes of value formation, resource integration, and promise orchestration embedded in institutional contexts. We further argue that Grönroos’s appeal to restore demand fulfilment requires deeper engagement with the institutional and sociocultural forces that shape demand. Finally, we propose three interlocking domains: relational value creation in use, integrated promise orchestration, and institutional governance of market practices, as foundational lenses for conceptualizing marketing phenomenon. Regrounding marketing in societal and practice-based realities advances a robust, institutionally informed ontology capable of guiding research and practice in an era marked by global, ecological, and socio-economic challenges.