When did 'marketing' become a term of abuse?
Latest press releasesThe marketing discipline is concerned with managing the value chain that links buyers and sellers. As an academic subject it features in most programmes of business and management education, and as a discipline has its own professors, academic journals and professional institutions.
Yet in common usage, the word 'marketing' is little better than a term of abuse. The public image is of institutionalised hucksterism, smoke and mirrors, deception, meaningless brands, and 'spin' and Public Relations. Even politicians are advised to 'stop listening to marketing men' for fear of contamination. Managers see marketing departments as untouchable, slippery and expensive, populated with brash wideboys who would do better to show less arrogance.
Professors in the disciple include Quislings who would rather be in more respectable, 'proper' academic disciplines like economics or psychology, but they can't live on the money there so they stay in marketing and contribute little of any value, and Cowboys whose only goal is to make money from whatever source they can find - consultancy, executive education, running their own companies, and so on - and have little time for teaching or research.
Marketing shows every sign of being a discipline in distress, searching for legitimacy. At the very least marketing's much-discussed 'mid-life crisis' seems to have lasted a very long time.
In fact, marketing's 'mid-life crisis' is nowhere more evident than in what it teaches. Most business school courses in marketing seem to imagine an organizational context of marketing functions that no longer exists - new organizational forms and networked organizations are largely ignored. Teaching is built around a model of marketing programmes that has been largely unchanged since the 1960s - a model enshrined in marketing textbooks which are variations on a theme from that distant era.
The result is marketing teaching which ignores the real challenges facing managers in favour of the comfort of familiar textbook notions of what marketing should be about. We teach product policy as a structured approach to incremental innovation and branding, in a world which demands radical innovation and increasingly focuses on collaborative networks and disruptive change. We teach pricing as a set of computational techniques, when the real world is about price visibility and customer value. Distribution is taught as choosing intermediaries and managing them while the real company struggles to cope with dominant customers and new value chain models. Marketing communications is considered as traditional advertising and promotion, to prepare people somewhat poorly for a reality of a new media and communications landscape where advertisers have little control over messages.
Worst of all, marketing as an academic discipline has lost intellectual leadership in its field, and this is what is reflected in its teaching. Radical new marketing ideas and theories are coming more from innovative companies like Google, IBM, Apple and McKinseys than from business schools. Marketing academics appear to have learned the secret of intellectual followership, as an easy alternative to intellectual leadership. Their role is increasingly as raconteur rather than thinker.
In very large part, this loss of leadership in marketing thinking reflects the state of research in marketing as an academic subject. Perhaps reflecting its implicit sense of inferiority compared to 'real' academic disciplines like organizational psychology and sociology (which now dominate what passes for management teaching in many business schools), research in marketing has been driven to an overwhelming narrowness in what is research and published. Don Lehmann from Columbia summarised the position in his unhappy conclusion that 'marketing has become the discipline of cents-off coupons'.
The narrowness of research in marketing is reinforced by journal reviewers and editors, who favour topics that can be constrained to 20 pages and cling to the familiar models - radical departures are not welcomed by academic journals, they are far too risky.
An obsession with measurement techniques has driven out the last vestiges of relevance in many marketing journals.
Where relevance is favoured, the typical approach is to ask managers what they want to see researched. But why do we believe they know or care? At best we substitute short-term expediency for intellectual progression.
For example, benchmarking against 'best practice' epitomises the approach of some schools to being relevant to managers and company performance. Yet then we fall into the trap of the 'limitations of imitation'. Research in marketing should be challenging the impact of benchmarking processes on organizational performance and the choice of benchmarks by managers, not simply accepting the conventional wisdom and dressing mindless measurement up in the clothes of academic respectability.
The need is clear. The need is for bigger ideas.
The challenge to the marketing discipline is to engage with the big ideas that are shaping the future of organizations and markets, and to break free from the constraints of small ideas that are easy to publish in academic journals.
Big ideas include the impact of dominant customers on the operation of value chains in markets and the move away from branding towards value-based marketing. We know little about the way in which 'markets under siege', like tobacco and others, actually operate. As yet, there has been no systematic investigation of the impact of corporate social responsibility initiatives on buyer-seller relationships. The impact of supermarket Wal-Mart on US healthcare reform (through its aggressive pricing of generic prescription drugs) is likely to be greater than the efforts of successive governments, and is paralleled in the 'payment by results' pricing of expensive drug treatments for the NHS - yet marketing analysis and investigation is largely conspicuous by its absence.
There is no shortage of big ideas. The issue is the willingness of academics in marketing to engage with them, and to accept that this will require them to change their publishing and teaching priorities.
One of the pre-eminent marketing scholars in the world is Jagdish Sheth from Emory University. His philosophy is clear - good marketing research should make it to the pages of the Wall Street Journal and Fortune magazine, and he believes that no academic article has ever changed a discipline because it is books which change disciplines. This is anathema to many marketing academics, which is kind of tough because it is almost certainly what we have to do to rescue the discipline from where it is now.
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Nigel Piercy's new book on marketing and business strategy, Market-Led Strategic Change: A Guide to Transforming the Process of Going to Market, will be published in September 2008 by Butterworth-Heinemann.
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