VIEWPOINT

Marketing is everything: the viewfrom the street

Michael SarenUniversity of Leicester, Leicester, UK

Abstract

Purpose – To show how the conceptual framework of the marketing discipline can be radicallyrevised and rethought, to be better in tune with the realities of the producer-consumer relationship inadvanced societies in the twenty-first century.

Design/methodology/approach – Commissioned as a viewpoint, with permission to “think aloud”.

Findings – Marketing thinkers need to broaden their horizons, look at the marketing phenomenon asconsumers experience it, and be prepared to learn from research conducted far beyond the confines ofconventional marketing theory. Specifically, the present-day context of marketing demands increasedattention to the relatively familiar concept of relationship marketing and the so far relatively unknownperspective called “critical marketing”.

Research limitations/implications – There is much integrative work to be done in effectivelyintegrating the wide range of theoretical inputs required to explain what “marketing” means today.

Practical implications – Though the rethinking advocated may be challenging for marketingpractitioners, the readings cited provide means for marketing educators to build the conceptualframeworks into applicable research and useful learning.

Originality/value – A glimpse of the future.

Keywords Marketing, Relationship marketing, Critical marketing

Paper type Viewpoint

Where’s the horizon?Most academic authors discuss marketing as a business discipline, from a managerialpoint of view: how to “do” marketing in companies and other organizations. But marketingas a subject is not just about being a marketing manager. On the contrary, the discipline isnowadays all-encompassing. Everything and anything is marketed – religion, politics,science, history; celebrities, careers, sport, art, fiction, fact. Marketing affects everybodybecause, as consumers, we cannot escape the market, even those of us who try to live thesimple life (Hill, 2002; Holt, 1998).

Marketing is not just an economic activity. It drives the consumer society, a cultureof consumption. Many contemporary commentators have pointed to marketing as oneof the key cultural architects of our time. They suggest that, since the 1950s, it hascome to play a significant role in the creation, maintenance and reproduction of tastes,dreams, aspirations, needs, identities, desires, morality and hedonism. The abundanceof marketing messages and signs for which the so-called “culture industries” areresponsible in everyday life may even qualify marketing professionals to carry the label“ministers of propaganda of the consumer culture” (Hirschman and Holbrook, 1982;Hirschmann, 2000).

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at

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Received October 2006Accepted October 2006

Marketing Intelligence & PlanningVol. 25 No. 1, 2007

pp. 11-16q Emerald Group Publishing Limited

0263-4503DOI 10.1108/02634500710722362

Marketing may appear to affect more and more of the world nowadays, but itspowerful effects are not new. Over the centuries, trade, exchange – what we now callmarketing – influenced how and why empires were built, technologies were applied,property law was developed, transport routes were constructed, languages developedand spread and the architecture of cities coped with shopping.

Friend of foe?Research by authors such as Elliott and Wattanasuwan (1998) shows that consumersare not passive recipients of what marketers do. They re-interpret marketing messages;display maker’s logos on products consumed; “present” themselves though what theyconsume; make choices; complain; window-shop; view celebrities as brands; competewith other consumers. Marketing needs to be studied and explained as consumersexperience it, as active participants in it. This requires a clear perspective on marketingas a social and cultural phenomenon, not just as a business function. We academicsalso need to understand how consumers, organizations and society can and do usemarketing – for example, in areas of social marketing and the construction ofconsumer “identity”.

The study and teaching of marketing has to move beyond the structure that hastraditionally been imposed on it, reflecting the so-called core marketing functions:advertising, distribution, strategy, sales, product development, and so on. Even if wewere to remain primarily concerned with the managerial aspects of the subject, weshould at least move beyond these “old” functional categories and start to view afreshhow companies and managers think about and set about marketing in the real world ofmarketing practice. In any case, the old marketing concepts are highly gendered. Theyadopt – for reasons I could never understand – the militarized language of strategyand tactics, campaigns and offensives, intelligence and planning, control andimplementation, targeting, market penetration, winning customers, beatingcompetitors.

The question is how can we rethink these notions and achieve a broader perspectiveon marketing? The are a couple of possibilities.

The rise and rise of relationship marketingOne way of achieving a different perspective on the subject is to study marketing froma relational perspective. This entails looking at how actors and organisations relate toeach other in and through marketing. The rationale for what is nowadays called“relationship marketing” is that few businesses, or people, can do everything bythemselves, so the building of relationships is a key element in marketing, indeed thekey element. Increasingly, companies realise that customers are their most importantasset, and view customer relationships as opportunities that need to be managed.The essential aim of relationship marketing strategies is of course value creation forboth parties through relationships and even partnerships in the marketplace. The mostimportant of these is usually with customers, but no-one should neglect otherstakeholders and partners who can influence and support companies’ marketingoperations.

Webster (1992) has much that is wise to say on this subject:

There has been a shift from a transactions to a relationship focus . . . From an academic ortheoretical perspective, the relatively narrow conceptualisation of marketing as a

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profit-maximisation problem, focused on market transactions, seems increasingly out oftouch with an emphasis on long term customer relationships and the formation andmanagement of strategic alliances . . . The focus shifts from products and firms as units ofanalysis to people, organisations, and the social processes that bind actors together inongoing relationships.

The relationship marketing concept has attracted attention and grown in popularitysignificantly over the last decade or so, particularly since the seminal articles in USAby Webster, as just cited, and Morgan and Hunt (1994). Its roots reach back, however,to academic studies of the conditions and behaviour in industrial and servicesmarketing in Europe in the 1970s, notably in Sweden and Finland. The key finding wasthat long-term relationships between buyers and seller were particularly important toeach party, and the conclusion that they were also critical in explaining marketingbehaviour and the development of markets. This was labelled the interaction approachby the influential Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) group.

In the UK, Ford (2004) has interpreted it this way:

The interaction approach is based on the idea that business markets aren’t made up of a largenumber of individually insignificant customers. Nor do they consist simply of action bysuppliers – who assemble a Marketing mix and launch it towards a group of passive buyers,whose only reaction is to chose whether or not to buy. Instead the process is one of interactionbetween active buyers and sellers that are individually significant to each other.

Considering that interaction between parties is one of the most important drivers ofrelationships, it seems astonishing that 30 years of evolution have resulted in littlemore than references to the “Nordic School” and the concept of interaction in thebusiness-to-business literature. The protagonists themselves now recognize the needfor further development of the construct and its theoretical underpinnings (Ford andHakansson, 2006). Nevertheless, a strength of the construct as it stands is thatresearchers’ and managers’ attention is focused on the relationships withoutnecessarily privileging the firm above the so-called “sovereign” customers. Indeed,the original ethos was precisely that of a “win-win” outcome for both parties tothe transaction (Moller and Halinen, 2000).

“Critical” marketingWhat I have called “critical marketing” extends its domain beyond the traditionalmanagerial and business confines, and beyond the familiar critique of unethicalmarketing practices, to analytical questioning of established, traditional marketingtheories and the assumptions behind them. In the broader field of management ingeneral, theorists have gathered together since 1999 in an international conferenceseries in Critical Management Studies, held bi-annually in the UK. As the convenor ofthe marketing stream convenor at all five conferences to date, I feel qualified to observethat marketing has lagged some way behind other academic management disciplinesin this arena, both in volume and visibility. Some ground has been made up recently, ina series of seminars in the UK between late 2004 and 2006, for which a “Group of Six”British marketing academics received funding from the Economic and Social ResearchCouncil.

The seminars were conceived as a means of bringing together scholars from avariety of disciplinary backgrounds and a number of countries, to foster a stronger

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critical forum within the academic marketing community. The proceedingsdemonstrate the debate and controversy surrounding the meaning and use of theterm “critical” and consequently around “critical marketing”. The organisers did notintend to be prescriptive, or to define our understanding of such terms too precisely inadvance. Instead, we wanted the seminars to open up a space where scholars andmarketing practitioners could discuss, argue and negotiate. The prefix “critical” is usedto signal that authors who take this standpoint subscribe to one of a number of radicalphilosophies and theories, which seek to make explicit certain ideologies andassumptions underlying the production of knowledge, the marketing and managementprocesses, and the wider context of socio-economic relations within which thoseactivities labelled as “marketing” occur.

One illustration of how a consumer-centred, critical view of what constitutes amarketing phenomenon can provide new insights into customer behaviour is providedby the recent stream of research asserting that the human body itself is the site of allconsumption. The act of consumption is “embodied” taking place in and through thebody. Sensory organ must “ingest” signs, symbols, messages and things, taking theminto the body, which is thus “contaminated” by the object of consumption.

This conceptual framework has yet to gain wide currency in marketing. Lest itsounds a little too postmodern, consider how much consumer and marketing activity iscentred on the body and consumers’ view of their own bodies – adornment, clothing,perfumery, cosmetics, tattoos, piercing, surgical and dental “enhancement” and so on.The use of products and services to “improve” one’s “body image” is a means ofidentity construction using the body as a site of consumption. Identity is often relatednowadays to the consumption of particular beauty, health-care and cosmetic products.People’s identities and self-esteem are so closely associated with their bodies that theycan strongly motivate the choice of foods, diet, sports, fitness, and medical and surgicalproducts aimed at affecting or changing body-image.

Some consumer behaviour researchers have recently taken interest this aspect ofsymbolic consumption – for instance, Thompson and Hirschman (1995). A particularfocus has been the role of the “embodied self” (Mauss, 1979), including studies ofcosmetic surgery and body art (Velliquette and Bamossy, 2001). The field of bodymodification provides a wealth of possible case studies for understanding the degree ofconsumer involvement both in the production, creation and consumption of a newhighly visible “identity”.

This single, very specific example of a framework for analysis of consumptionbehaviour demonstrates how any attempt to provide a comprehensive treatment ofmarketing as an academic discipline must encompass the wide range of activities andeffects that it manifests in practice today. It is not possible to make all the traditionalmarketing theories and concepts fit this broad agenda. That requires an alternativeapproach, which sets the subject in its wider contexts and draws on relevant ideas fromassociated literature beyond conventional marketing. It also calls into question theconventional view of “relevance” in marketing, reaching beyond managers’ and firms’direct interests to encompass consumer, social and public policy implications. AsWensley (2007) will point out, this questioning should take place in the context ofcritical marketing itself:

Within the critical approach, the issue of relevance and impact is frequently seen asproblematic. This is particularly true of fields such as management and marketing, where

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relevance itself has often been defined in a restricted manner to imply usefulness as measuredby a sub-group of either practitioners or self-selected intermediaries . . . We can recognisethere are also questions to be asked about the basis and purpose of critical approaches inmarketing.

So what now?Some of you may well be wondering exactly how the relational and (particularly)critical approaches to the subject can be adopted in mainstream marketing practice.That requires a fundamental reappraisal of what constitutes marketing activity bystrategists and planners. We are past the point of believing that it can be reduced andsimplified into a set of point-by-point managerial prescriptions. For those of you whothink it might be intriguing or even useful to take all this further, the readings in thereferences will provide stimulating tasters of the rethinking required.

References

Elliott, R. and Wattanasuwan, K. (1998), “Brands as resources for the symbolic construction ofidentity”, International Journal of Advertising, Vol. 17 No. 2.

Ford, D. (2004), “The IMP group and international marketing”, International Marketing Review,Vol. 21 No. 2, pp. 139-41.

Ford, D. and Hakansson, H. (2006), “The idea of business interaction”, The IMP Journal, Vol. 1No. 1, pp. 4-27.

Hill, R.P. (2002), “Consumer culture and the culture of poverty: implications for marketing theoryand practice”, Marketing Theory, Vol. 2 No. 3, pp. 273-93.

Hirschmann, E.C. (2000), Heroes, Monsters and Messiahs: Movies and Television Shows as theMythology of American Culture, Andrew McMeel, Kansas City, MO.

Hirschman, E.C. and Holbrook, M.B. (1982), “The experiential aspects of consumption: consumerfantasies, feelings and fun”, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 9 No. 2, pp. 132-40.

Holt, D.B. (1998), “Does cultural capital structure American consumption?”, Journal of ConsumerResearch, Vol. 25 No. 1.

Mauss, M. (1979), Body Techniques in Sociology and Psychology, Routledge and Kegan Paul,London, (Trans. B. Brewster).

Moller, K. and Halinen, A. (2000), “Relationship marketing theory: its roots and direction”,Journal of Marketing Management, Vol. 16 Nos 1/3, pp. 29-54.

Morgan, R.M. and Hunt, S.D. (1994), “The commitment-trust theory of relationship marketing”,Journal of Marketing, Vol. 58 No. 3, pp. 20-38.

Thompson, C. and Hirschman, E.C. (1995), “‘Understanding the socialized body: apoststructuralist analysis of consumers’ self conceptions, body images and self-carepractices”, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 32 No. 2, pp. 139-53.

Velliquette, A. and Bamossy, G. (2001), “The role of body adornment and the self-reflexive bodyin life-style cultures and identity”, European Advances in Consumer Research, Vol. 5, p. 21.

Webster, F.E. (1992), “The changing role of marketing in the corporation”, Journal of Marketing,Vol. 56 No. 4, pp. 1-17.

The Gang of Six Wensley, R. (2007), “Relevance of critique: can and should critical marketinginfluence practice and policy?”, Critical Marketing: Defining the Field, Elsevier, Oxford(in press).

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Further reading

Saren, M. (2006), Marketing Graffiti, Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford.

Vargo, S.L. and Lusch, R.F. (2004), “Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing”,Journal of Marketing, Vol. 68 No. 1, pp. 1-17.

Corresponding authorMichael Saren can be contacted at: majs1@le.ac.uk

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