The Life and Death of Marketing:

Regenerating Marketing through definitional change

Dr Stephen DannAustralian National University

This isn’t a definition, it’s a goddamn arms race

I am an arms dealer.Fitting you with weapons in the form of words

And don't really care, which side winsAs long as the room keeps marketing

That's just the business I'm in

Tracking the life and deaths of marketing through the

ages

The Usual Suspect

No discussion of the death (past, present or future) of marketing is complete without mentioning Brown in some context or another…

Appearing live at

ANZMAC08

Stephen Brown

Marketing and a Side Order of Phoenix

AMA 1935

AMA 1985

AMA 2004

AMA 2007

AMA 2010*

*That’s when my next book is due out, and they’ve trashed the last two by changing the definitions…

Marketing 1.0: “Death by Stereo”

“the performance of business activities that direct the flow of goods and services from producers to consumers”– AMA (1935)

Marketing 2.0: “A good soldier”

the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational objectives’AMA (1985)

Holbrook and Hulbert’s (2002) Autopsy Report

The death of marketing would have come from the post-marketing universe - a future post-marketing era of mass customization which, in conjunction with the enhanced information exchange of electronic commerce would do to marketing what CD players did to turntables [1]

[1] I say we sneak up on enhanced exchange of information and do to them what MP3s did to CD players.

Marketing 3.0“Lived fast, died young, left a confused looking

corpse”

an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders AMA (2004)

The Many Deaths of Marketing (2004-2007)

Drive by Schultzing“marketing research is in a death spiral and

it's taking marketing down with it” - Schultz (2005)

A murder-suicide pact without the murder?

Market research autopsy reported • terminal cases methodology being valued ahead of

insight• journals emphasizing data ahead of interpretation

• marketing research degenerating into an overused set of tools and techniques

• Marketing being the use of techniques on data rather than the creation of results

Marketing valuing technique over insight?

Nonsense!And I can prove it with a LISREL-AMOS

dual core correlation post nominal aquaproxy model based on running on a Bayesian fuzzy logic regression discrete choice colinear model derived from Leximancer data captured through data mining of scanner data captured from Web 2.0 social graphs encapsulated in folksonomies utilising widget based tag cloud classifications stratas relying on the Markov Model approach combined with the incremental step wise classification of Long Tail occurrences of standardized distributions of word of mouth in the Journal of Marketing peer reviewed blog…

Forking up the discipline

Services Dominant Logic is

not a death of marketing

(if it is, Vargo, Lusch, you’re on notice)

“Under the S-D logic, the central

elements of marketing are processes

and service flows rather than units of output”

(Vargo and Lusch, 2004).

(Thanks to Karpen, Bove and Josiassen (2007) for the line)

SDL still needs to pass the ENC* test

*Emperor’s New Clothes

Deathproofing Marketing

Marketing only works if the marketers themselves believe that it will work- Brown (2005)

Unless marketers chant “I do believe in marketing, I do, I do”, all hope in marketing will be lost and marketing itself will die

– Dann (2007) taunting Brown (2005) with Hook and Snee (2003)

Marketing. Dead or Alive. Possibly Schrödinger’s Cat[1].

Marketing is dead Marketing is Alive

[1] The thought experiment involving a cat, a box, and unknown status of the cat being alive and/or dead which is only resolved by observation of the state of the cat. How come nobody asks about the practical business application and managerial relevance of sticking a cat in a box in the name of science?

Not wanting to break with peer reviewed history, or harm the chance of publication by using ideas not previously thought up by someone else…

I declare that marketing is dead*

* Schultz (2005), Holbrook and Hubert (2002), Earls (2002), Brown (slightest provocation), Kotler (possibly) and Dann (currently)…

Where dead means alive

Introducing AMA (2007)…

Marketing 4.0: AMA 2007“Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated”

The AMA's Definition of Marketing will now be:

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

Approved by the AMA Board of Directors, October 25, 2007

Summary of changes

Marketing has changed focus

Exchange theory has been reintegrated

“offerings that have value” rather than value itself

“customers, clients, partners and society at large”.

What does this mean for the death of marketing?

Regeneration of Marketing

As Eccleston (2005)[1] is to Tennant (2006-2007)[2], AMA (2004) is to AMA (2007) - a short lived, but vital transition that bridged the gaps in continuity, and allowed an opportunity to explore a new era with the fallback of regeneration to recapture the elements lost in transition[3]

[1] The ninth actor to play the title role of Doctor Who in the eponymous BBC drama series2.[2] The tenth actor to play Dr Who* [3] And allow for the actor playing the AMA (2004) to pursue other projects without having to wrap up the discipline of marketing.

Ultimately though…

There are two certainties in life

And we don’t do taxes in marketing

"You might be a king or a little street sweeper, but sooner or

later you'll dance with the reaper."

The Duke of Spook, the Doc of Shock, The Man with No Tan, Death himself, the Grim Reaper. Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991)