Marketing

A Critical Introduction

Chris Hackley, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781412911498, 9781412911481
• eBook ISBN: 9781473903685
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

`I see this book as an important addition to the marketing literature. A weakness in critical approaches to marketing is that they are often not made easily accessible to undergraduate students. Chris Hackley has done a wonderful job in producing a rigorous text that remedies this situation and makes critical perspectives accessible to all? - Professor Rob Lawson, University of Otago

 

Does marketing really work for organizations, managers and citizens? How can marketing management be studied and practised critically?

 

This key text introduces the essentials of critical thinking within the field of marketing in easy to read and understandable terms. Integrating critical perspectives with the topics of the typical marketing curriculum, Chris Hackley has produced an indispensable supporting text for upper level, undergraduate and postgraduate Marketing courses. A wide range of issues are covered including:

 

- Historical origins and influences in marketing

- Introduction to the concepts of Critical Theory

- Marketing 'orientation' and the marketing 'mix'

- Critique of marketing principles

- Marketing and strategy

- The role of research in marketing

- Marketing and managerial ideology

- Marketing ethics

 

Each chapter includes Chapter Review questions, Case studies reflecting issues in the chapters, along with supporting case questions and reflections, as well as stimulating practical examples.

 

CHAPTER 1

MARKETING STUDIES:
THE CRITICAL
STANDPOINT

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CHAPTER OUTLINE

Chapter 1 introduces the rationale and approach of the book. The chapter outlines some penetrating criticisms which have been levelled at Marketing practice and Marketing studies. The chapter goes on to examine the critical standpoint in Marketing studies and offers a simplifying typology of critique with examples of how this typology might play out in terms of some of the general and specific criticisms of the managerial Marketing approach. This typology is revisited throughout the book.

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Introduction

As a critical introduction to Marketing studies, this book assumes that readers already have a working knowledge of the applied management principles, the ‘tools and concepts’, of Marketing. Taking these as a starting point, it develops lines of argument which critique those tools and concepts and the various assumptions which underpin them. The intention is to set the typical Marketing studies topics within a more rounded intellectual, historical and institutional context than is found in mainstream books and courses. The book is written for students, academics, researchers and practitioners to offer a resource for a deeper sense of intellectual engagement with Marketing, which includes but also goes beyond the applied, managerial perspective.

The critical tone of this book will jar with many students of Marketing more used to the very upbeat, positive and affirmative tone of typical textbooks on the subject. Professor Philip Kotler’s (still) original Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, Implementation and Control (1967) epitomizes the normative managerial Marketing approach with which so many thousands of students are familiar. The reach of Kotler’s Marketing management approach (and its many imitators) has been such that many students of the subject already possess a working knowledge of its conceptual vocabulary of consumer orientation, segmentation, positioning and targeting even before they begin their formal studies.

Marketing studies have become so closely identified with a technical enterprise of managerial problem solving that criticism can hardly penetrate the glossy veneer covering its mass-market textbooks. Wealth and value creation are the espoused values of managerial Marketing. What can there be to criticize about a set of techniques designed to make organizations work more effectively for managers, shareholders, customers and society? The Marketing concept of customer orientation, its techniques of market research and product development and its persuasive targeting, branding, retailing and advertising approaches are typically deployed in an uncritical managerial agenda which promotes organizational effectiveness above all else. But the vacuum of critique in the discipline has serious personal, educational, civil and environmental implications. There is a striking need, therefore, for a thoroughgoing critical stance as an intellectual and moral counterpoint to the managerial problem-solving style of Marketing studies and the values which sustain it. Indeed, there is a need for an organic Marketing studies to balance the heavily processed, chemically constituted managerial Marketing brand.

The idea of critique can mean very different things in different contexts. Marketing studies is typically conceived as an applied management field in which critique does not normally extend beyond functional evaluation of its problem-solving techniques. Marketing, many popular textbooks claim, is a ‘critical’ organizational function. By this, they do not mean that it is intellectually rigorous, but merely that it is important. It is hard to deny that Marketing is important, to wealth distribution, economic growth, employment and industrial competitiveness. It is a collection of activities, processes and practices with wide-ranging organizational, economic and social implications. But a critical focus which falls narrowly on the technical efficiency of Marketing is hardly adequate because it does not examine the ways in which ideas are constructed and sustained and the forms of social and economic organization they support. This book, then, takes Marketing studies, as it is typically understood as a managerial discipline, as a relatively critique-free zone which would benefit from a radical reappraisal.

Criticisms of Marketing are, by implication, criticisms of the role of Marketing studies in management education and training. There are resonant calls for Marketing practice to serve the world better, for example, by developing more environmentally friendly products and services; by using resources more effectively and efficiently; by working for sustainable and socially positive forms of consumption; and by generally incorporating a stronger sense of ethics and social responsibility within the theories, the practice and the educational programmes of Marketing. Within the Marketing field, there is a crisis of confidence as regards the power of its ideas to influence markets and fulfil the strategic objectives of organizations, while Marketing academics wonder whether their theories and research really engage in the right way with any of the key audiences for Marketing studies: practitioners, students, employers, citizens and society in general. So, even the most vocationally inclined student of Marketing, lacking even a shred of intellectual curiosity, will benefit from an appreciation of critical perspectives in the subject, if only so that he or she can engage with the kinds of criticism inevitably faced by professional Marketers with suitably adroit sophistry. For those with a more detached curiosity about the world, an engagement with critical Marketing studies can be a surprising and fascinating adventure.

Criticizing Marketing: Where to Begin?

The tone of many Marketing textbooks (Brown, 1995a; Hackley, 2003a) implicitly signals to students that criticism is outside the boundaries of Marketing studies. The style of writing in many such books casts Marketing as an ideology to be accepted, or rejected, uncritically. So criticizing aspects of the subject will seem unsettling for some students used only to the conventional style of Marketing text. But the edifice of Marketing studies does not collapse if it is subject to criticism. Instead, possibilities for a new Marketing studies emerge. So, disorientating as it may be for students of managerial Marketing, it is probably best to dive straight in at the deep end. A frank encounter with some of the main criticisms of managerial Marketing studies might feel like a cold shower of disillusionment to some, given that framed Marketing degree certificates take pride of place on so many living room walls. But it isn’t the subject itself which is being criticized, nor is it the ability or sincerity of its students or teachers. Rather, it is the values which have come to frame the way Marketing studies is popularly conceived which attract such vehement criticism.

General Criticisms of Marketing Studies

Given the level of acceptance Marketing concepts and Marketing studies have achieved globally, it may come as a surprise to many students of the subject that, for many of its critics, it simply has no features which redeem its fatal ethical, practical and intellectual shortcomings. The ways the subject is typically conceived, practised and taught have been roundly criticized for, among many other things: (see Alvesson, 1994; Brownlie et al., 1999; Burton, 2001, 2005; Crane, 2000; Cova, 2005; Jack, 2008; Klein, 2000; Tadajewski, 2006a; Witkowski, 2005; and Dholakia et al., 1980, in Tadajewski and Brownlie, 2008; Firat and Venkatesh, 1995; Gronroos, 1994; Gummesson, 2002a; Hastings and Haywood, 1994; Sheth and Sisodia, 2005).

• a perceived lack of real intellectual engagement with other disciplines
• a lack of response to criticisms of practising managers that Marketing does not deliver
• an over-emphasis on narrow managerial priorities and consumer self-interest
• complicity in environmental issues such as waste and destruction of resources
• a lack of theory development as a result of a misguided model of practice
• a tendency to cling uncritically to outdated concepts of limited value
• an overriding focus on transactions and profit rather than relationships and value
• intellectual shallowness, emphasizing naive instrumentalism over critical reflexivity
• a lack of moderation and a tendency to universalize North American neo-liberal values
• an over-emphasis on quantitative modelling in a positive-empiricist social science

Arguments over the declining role of critical thinking and the dumbingdown influence of positivistic learning objectives go on in all university subjects. No teaching subjects are immune to the commercial and ideological forces facing universities, and all entertain deep intellectual divisions and impassioned debates. In many subjects, these debates are largely invisible to students on mainstream courses. Criticisms such as those above reflect sincere debates within the field. They are not dissimilar to the kinds of argument which go on in other fields of management, social and human studies, and they should be taken seriously if we are to understand why they arise, what they mean and what response is appropriate.

Criticisms of Marketing do not end with nice intellectual distinctions about the most appropriate sources of theory or research methods. There are widespread perceptions that the business function of Marketing simply does not deliver on its claims. Sheth and Sisodia (2005) write in the academics’ top Marketing journal, the Journal of Marketing (JM), that:

Marketing effectiveness is down. Marketing is intrusive. Productivity is down. People resent Marketing. Marketing has no seat at the table at board level and top management. Academics aren’t relevant. And we have an ethical and moral crisis. Other than that, we’re in good shape. (p. 10)

A thoroughgoing critical Marketing studies must, then, acknowledge not only the ethical and intellectual criticisms levelled at the subject and also the charge that it is guilty, at best, of political naivety, but must also take on board the admission of the field’s top research journal that Marketing falls considerably short of its claims as a management technique.

Depressingly, Marketing and business management academics get little credit for acknowledging the weaknesses in their discipline and are seen by the unsympathetic as no more than corporate ideologists. In fact, some Marketing academics are quite indifferent to such a label and see no need for critique at all. This indifference, though, invites serious criticism from outside the discipline. For many critics, Marketing studies is a field of science which can demonstrate no progress, a field of social science which does not engage with social issues, and a field of human study which, reduced to technical problem solving, is thoroughly dehumanized. A critical appreciation of Marketing studies needs to engage with these criticisms to understand why they arise and to evaluate their fairness.

Scott (2007) (herself an internationally eminent Marketing academic) expresses the widely held view that Marketing is a part of a relatively ‘homogenous and uncritical’ management and business enterprise which attracts the undisguised contempt of academicians outside business and management because of its ‘ostrich-like’ intellectual blindness which renders it incapable of meeting ‘the challenges of either practice or ethics’ because ‘it so totally lacks critical perspective’. Scott (2007) goes on to say that ‘regardless of the level of scientific rigour that may be flaunted, the determination of business schools to be the unquestioning handmaids of industry make them a laughing stock at the campus level of most universities’ (p. 7).

Such severe criticism might seem unfair, even perverse. It is, at least, a serious charge given the resources devoted to Marketing education, the importance of management education to the economy and to wider society and the amount of time and money invested in Marketing courses by thousands of individuals. Many Marketing academics feel that criticisms such as these are indeed unfair. They argue that its scholarship enjoys a rich and varied connection with the statistical and social sciences and the humanities, even if this breadth of influence is seldom evident in typical taught courses or textbooks. Most Marketing and management academics feel that they are academics first, and management academics second. They feel that intellectual values guide their teaching and research. Clearly, management subjects have an applied character too. But management academics feel that a direct connection with worlds of practice can be intellectually enabling. If they have failed in communicating or preserving these values, there is a case to answer.

Specific Criticisms of Marketing Studies

So much for general criticisms of Marketing studies. These are comprehensive enough, and will be elaborated upon throughout the book, but will seem very abstract to many students of Marketing management. An outline of some more specific criticisms of managerial Marketing’s concepts might provide a more concrete point of departure for a critical Marketing studies. Once the more direct criticisms of Marketing’s functionality as a management technique have been outlined, it is possible to ask deeper questions about why, if these criticisms have any grounds, the discipline has not evolved new theories to challenge or replace the old ones.

Does the Marketing Concept Work?

Whether the Marketing concept deserves to be taken seriously as a management maxim is a big question which deserves a lengthier treatment than it is given here. Suffice to say that the way the concept is generalized into a one-size-fits-all panacea for organizational problems in popular textbooks is regarded with no little scepticism in some quarters (Brown, 1995a; Wensley, 1988; 2007). According to Ted Levitt’s influential article, ‘Marketing myopia’ (1960), organizations flourish by finding out what customers want and then giving it to them. This is the essence of the Marketing concept, which holds that Marketing is not merely an organizational function concerned with sales and customer service but is no less than a philosophy of business (Drucker, 1954) which, in the Marketing oriented organization, should permeate every department. Organizations which focus on production, cost efficiency or sales will, ultimately, fail, according to Levitt’s (1960) vision of Marketing orientation. The customer-focused and market-oriented organization will succeed. Kotler (1967) averred that this managerial concept can be put into action through a sequence of market analysis, strategic planning, implementation and control. Market success can, on this model, be directed by skilled Marketing managers armed with the right market information, primed with the right strategy and operationalized with the right Marketing techniques.

All of which will sound very familiar to people even superficially acquainted with managerial Marketing. The Marketing concept of organizational success through customer focus and market orientation is rather too general to prove or to refute. And this is one criticism levelled at it. It simply doesn’t amount to anything more than folklore, at least according to its detractors. But, to take it seriously as a heuristic or ‘rule of thumb’ for management action, it seems to imply a rather static business model. Conventional Marketing’s most persistent credibility problem lies in the evidence that significant numbers of business success stories seem to owe little or nothing to Marketing’s key precepts. On the face of it, some highly successful organizations which claim to be customer-focused treat customers badly on occasions and don’t necessarily base their activities on detailed market analysis. Instead, their success seems to be founded on a customer value proposition which people find attractive. The organization then exploits all the market power it can to push that offer into the market.

The point that the classic Marketing concept does not seem to fit many organizational successes has been made forcefully by many commentators. Brown, for example, (2001a, 2003, 2005b, 2006a, 2007) has argued that teasing, rather than satisfying, customers has been the key for some global Marketing successes, including the Harry Potter phenomenon and Ryanair, and also for unconventional Marketing geniuses like P. T. Barnum and ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker. Some of the typical examples of Marketing success cited in mainstream textbooks (McDonald’s, Avis, Reader’s Digest, Microsoft, Ford, etc.) are open to the charge that Marketing textbooks depend on them more than their success depended on Marketing textbooks. Entrepreneurial flair, imagination, drive and leadership might explain those iconic brands rather better than the Marketing concept. Counter examples might include Microsoft, the now-ancient history lesson in innovation leadership of the Sony Walkman, and more recent developments in internet business models. YouTube.com, for example, built up huge volumes of customer traffic by giving away its service free. Subsequently, Google paid a vast sum for its advertising potential. In effect, Google was buying a customer base from a provider that didn’t sell any products. That is a business model which would seem highly improbable, wer...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Marketing Studies: The Critical Standpoint
• 2 The Origins and Institutions of Marketing Studies
• 3 Marketing Studies and Managerial Ideology
• 4 The Marketing Mix and the Challenge of Cultural Branding
• 5 The Strategy Discourse and Marketing Studies
• 6 Research, Theory and Resistance in Marketing Studies
• 7 The ‘Real World’ of Marketing as Literary Construction
• 8 Consumer Rationality, Critical Theory and Ethics: Three Issues for a Critical Marketing Studies
• Glossary
• References
• Index