FOR APPROVAL THEORY/CONCEPTUAL The theoretical foundations of strategic marketing and marketing strategy: foundational premises, R-A theory, three fundamental strategies, and societal welfare Shelby D. Hunt 1 Received: 19 August 2015 /Accepted: 7 October 2015 # Academy of Marketing Science 2015 Abstract The strategic marketing field of study has long suf- fered from an identity problem: the field has lacked clarity and consensus as to its theoretical foundations, its nature, and its scope. There have been two recent approaches that contribute to resolving the identity problem. First, Varadarajan’ s(Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 38, 119–140, 2010) approach focuses on strategic marketing's (1) domain, (2) def- inition, (3) fundamental issues, and (4) and foundational pre- mises. Second, resource-advantage (R-A) theory's approach focuses on how R-A theory provides a theoretical grounding for eight forms of business and marketing strategy. This article evaluates how the two approaches relate to each other and shows how R-A theory (1) grounds extant business and mar- keting theories of strategy, (2) illuminates, informs, extends, and grounds the sixteen foundational premises of the strategic marketing field that Varadarajan (Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 38, 119–140, 2010) proposes, (3) implies that there are three fundamental strategies, “superior value”, “lower cost”, and “synchronal”, and (4) shows how the three fundamental strategies promote societal welfare. Therefore, the two approaches, when considered jointly, complement each other and foster the development of the field of strategic marketing and the forms of marketing strategy. Keywords Strategic marketing . Marketing strategy . Resource-advantage theory . Foundational premises . Fundamental strategies . Societal welfare The strategic marketing field of study has long suffered from an identity problem: the field has lacked clarity and consensus as to its theoretical foundations, its nature, and its scope. Varadarajan (2010, p. 120) maintains that the identity problem constitutes an “identity crisis, ” and he contributes to resolving the identity prob- lem by proposing answers to four questions that are central to developing strategic marketing as a field of study. (1) What is the domain of strategic marketing? (2) How should “marketing strat- egy, ” the principal focus of strategic marketing, be defined? (3) What issues are fundamental to strategic marketing? And (4), what are marketing strategy’ s foundational premises, that is, what premises “generalize across products, markets, and time hori- zons” (Varadarajan 2010, p. 134)? Because Varadarajan’ s (2010) answers to the four questions are thoughtful, thorough, and well-argued, the article promises to be seminal for the stra- tegic marketing field. Like Varadarajan’ s(2010) work, resource-advantage (R-A) theory also contributes to resolving strategic marketing’ s identity problem (Hunt 2010). Understanding how it contributes requires understanding how R-A theory has recently evolved. At its in- ception (Hunt and Morgan 1995), R-A theory was positioned as a theory that, compared with neoclassical perfect competition theory, could better explain two questions. 1 First, in terms of wealth creation, innovativeness, and overall quality of goods and services, why are market-based economies far superior to command economies? Second, why do market-based economies have such a diverse assortment of firms? For example, why do firms differ so greatly in size, the number of products produced, and financial performance? The next stage in its evolution was when R-A theory was argued to be a dynamic, general theory of competition that incorporates static, perfect competition theory as a special case (Hunt and Morgan 1996, 1997). 1 See Hunt (2012) for a discussion of themajor events that influenced the evolution of R-A theory. * Shelby D. Hunt shelby.hunt@ttu.edu 1 Rawls College of Business, Department of Marketing, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409-2101, USA AMS Rev DOI 10.1007/s13162-015-0069-5