Is marketing an art or a science? Marketing differs from the natural sciences because:

Option A fits well. However my opinion is that natural sciences covers the logical part on the other hand marketing is a part of creativity that is reason why its an art.

a) Marketing tends to deal with open systems whereas the natural sciences tend to deal with closed systems.

For more than30 years, marketing scholars have debated whether or not marketing is a science (e.g., Alderson and Cox1948, Bartels1951, Baumol1957, Buzzell1963, Converse1945, Hunt1976, O'Shaughnessy and Ryan1979, Taylor1965). The typical approach has been to offer a formal definition of science or describe prototypic methods used in science and then compare marketing's key features and/or its developmental progress against these standards. Despite these fairly intense analyses, a consensus regarding the scientific status of marketing has not yet been achieved. Some believe that marketing is a science, while others believe that although scientific procedures are employed in marketing, on the whole, marketing is an art. In contrast to these two segments, many other marketing scholars seem to be withholding judgment, perhaps awaiting more compelling arguments one way or the other.

Although well intentioned, we believe the debate regarding whether or not marketing is a science has been largely unproductive. For the most part, we attribute the current confusion to the somewhat naive conceptions of science that have informed the controversy. In particular, we consider the typical beliefs about how scientists do scientific work and how scientific progress is achieved to be inconsistent with current views about such issues in the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, and history of science. That is, in asking, "Is marketing a science?" marketing scholars have been comparing theory development and testing in marketing to inappropriate standards that have little to do with the conduct of scientific inquiry in any field.SO I WILL SAY THE ANSWER IS C.

Marketing is the science of art. These option are quite limited but I tend to chose a) 

My answer will be ============= a)

Marketing is an art to get attention to the people and there will like it how we showing the art. Marketing main purpose is profits, revenue and market share. Difference from natural science that’s points.

Option a) <<<<<<<<<<<<answer

Marketing is a science. You learn it then you apply it. It is based on knowledge, on statistics, on consumer profile, market reasearch and so on. You obtain, analyze and interpret data. You make use of the tools available. Quite often you also test your theories before you attempt a full-scale introduction.

The art part consists in knowing all its secrets, having deep knowledge of the marketing science, smart using the tools and then, maybe, you will be able to develop a new theory or come up with a new tool that proves to be awesome. 

Marketing is a science because marketing is about understanding and influencing behaviors of the people. The main subject studied in Marketing is Psychology, the science of behaviors which studies how people react to certain stimuli in a measurable ways. Marketing is a science because marketing is about measuring and analyzing the numbers. How many prospects do you reach? How many people read your message? How many people do you converted to buyers? How much do they spend? How many buy again? Math and accounting are important sciences to your business. 

Many marketers try to prove marketing as art when they can't measure their results.  

It differs from the Natural Sciences as Natural Sciences defines the parameters and the results prior to your experiments you just confirm the results but in marketing you can only predict and the results may have some variation to your perdition.

Definitely marketing differs from natural sciences in dealing with open systems as opposed to fixed closed systems dealt by natural sciences.

However, one cannot choose between marketing being an art or a science, as it actually is a blend of both. The science part identifies, analyses and seeks to impact the human behaviour (customers) while the art is to actually convincingly influence that behaviour with creative marketing campaigns. One can argue that even psychologists do that and that makes influencing behaviour a science, but i believe that psychologists either impact human behaviour when it arises out of fear (when a patient approaches them for some disorder and agrees to do as guided) or by way of 1-on-1 interactions. But marketeers actually aim to influnce masses without actually getting in touch with the target segment. That is where true art takes over, of course backed by the scientifc understanding of humans, called mob psychology.