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MANY DIFFERENT “MARKETINGS”!

Academia are busy churning out definitions of marketing, some of which seemingly refer to disparate domains. They are also busy concocting curricula, mostly Kotleroid ones. If you compare college courses in physics, biology, engineering, etc., anywhere on the globe, they will be similar. But marketing courses and fundamentals vary widely. To begin with, when muddling through the academic jungle, a student might infer that there are two primary poles in marketing:

CLIENTO-MARKETING

This is the marketing philosophy and craft of viewing things “from the Client’s perspective.” Elements of it have been with us for ages. Its essence and role were splendidly described by Peter Drucker: “Marketing is a whole business seen from the customer’s point of view… The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself… Ideally, marketing should result in a customer who is ready to buy.”

Lo and behold, read and re-read this:

“…know and understand the customer”

“…a whole business seen from the customer’s point of view”

“… a customer who is ready to buy”

Customer, buyer, Client… marketing.

The hero of that marketing is the Client, understood as any stakeholder, first of all the buyer: an unfathomable personage who is sophisticated, cynical, overproposed, fed up with advertising, and armed with the Internet. Theodore Levitt adds: “Consumers are unpredictable, varied, fickle, stupid, shortsighted, stubborn, and generally bothersome.” Like it or not, but that’s the REAL client for you.

Written precepts of cliento-marketing take not much book space. They are easy to learn but not easy to apply. A similar situation occurs in music and versification – nearly anyone can master the theory of these pursuits but not anyone by far can compose music or verses. To be successful, a cliento-marketer should possess some special thinking, which can be called creative marketing thinking.

Good marketing thinkers are valued by business. Says Apple Computer’s ex-president John Sculley: “Marketing is… less a single-minded discipline or set of skills than it is an attitude, a way of thinking. A good marketer has to be conceptually intuitive, to look for different points of view to solve old problems. One has to see the world differently… One also has to be incredibly resourceful in searching for different perspectives… Some of the best marketing comes from people who lack a marketing background but who are simply good thinkers.”

Unfortunately, cliento-marketers are not produced by most universities and schools.

ECONOMO-MARKETING

It came into existence in the 1960s, when alongside the useful practical craft called marketing there emerged and blossomed a dubious university discipline with the same name. It was taught by teachers of economics. Now it is a full-fledged dogmatized pseudoscientific discipline, essentially a slightly marketinized economics. One of its definitions:

“Marketing is a system of views, a function of the coordination of various aspects of commercial activity, a complex of inter-related elements of business activities, a philosophy of business, whose aim is to MITIGATE OVERPRODUCTION CRISES, and finally the process of BALANCING SUPPLY AND DEMAND.”

Really?

Economo-marketers have quickly populated what they deem to be marketing with scholastic schemes, (pseudo)mathematics, and non-existent robot-like Clients similar to Homo economicus. Their ways are: SONK-ing (Scientification of Non-Knowledge) – a term coined by Andrew Ehrenberg; contempt for practitioners; wishful thinking; proving nothing; rigor (mortis). The principal of that infamous school of mental onanism is Philip Kotler. (See ““Kotler and Kotleroids” .)

Mastering such “marketing” does not require any special talents, just a couple of pants to study them off, while rote learning dozens of schemes, definitions, terms, etc. Unlike cliento-marketing, it is child’s play to employ – you have just to remember, or look up in a brick-sized compendium, a suitable pretty scheme, and force fit your situation into it. And if life does not want to be forced into that Procrustean bed, who cares!

CONFLICTING OPINIONS ON EVERYTHING

On virtually any issue a student may encounter conflicting opinions in the literature. This even concerns the fundamentals. So, some (e.g., Michael Porter, Al Ries and Jack Trout) maintain that marketing is war with the competitors. That idea gave rise to competitor-orientation.

Other marketers, mainly Asian ones, say precisely the opposite: “Modern marketing is love. Love for your consumers, meeting their requirements. (Mitsuaki Shimaguchi). If there is any battle in marketing, it is for the consumer’s mind share, not for market share. This is the idea of the opposite philosophy, that of client-orientation, and cliento-marketing.

Well, dear “gurus”: shall we fight or love?

EVER NEWER “NEW MARKETINGS”

Each self-proclaimed guru comes up with his new “new marketing.” Some keep changing them like gloves. The researcher of Philip Kotler’s exploits Stephen Brown [1] writes: “The Venerable Phil… has announced a ‘new marketing’ paradigm on at least eight separate occasions, each one a challenge to the prevailing approach (previously laid down by Kotler himself!).”

In his last masterpiece of marketing fantasia “Marketing 3.0: Values-Driven Marketing” Professor Kotler professed a further new marketing: “Marketing should be redefined to its root as a triangle of Positioning, Differentiation, and Brand.” Previously, he maintained that “A brand is an offering from a known source” (e.g., from a hot-dog stand round the corner). Marketing practitioners eagerly await further immortal revelations from The Venerable Phil.

IT’S A HUGE SCANDAL

According to some estimates, marketing academic industry, with journals and all, is worth $1.5 billion. It seems to be blithely unaware that it is socially meaningless: most academics produce disastrous marketing graduates, do irrelevant research, and publish papers only read by other academia, but… nobody commits hara-kiri, and only a couple of Donquijotic characters make a ripple [2, 3, 4].

Peter Drucker said: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” I think he meant marketing academics. If academics really want to be of some value to business and society, they need a Perestoika-style revolutionary change.

Why was Perestroika in the USSR successful? One of the reasons was that people were sick and tired of duplicity and hypocrisy that permeated the entire Soviet life. Hapless Soviet students had to learn stilted Marxist dogmas that had nothing to do with the real world out there – not unlike the dogmas of academic marketing [6].

Quo vadis?

REFERENCES

1. Stephen Brown, “”

2. Peter November, “”

3. Stephen Matchett, “”

4. Edward Forrest, Jamie Murphy and Larry Neale, “”

5. Alexander Repiev, “”

6. Alexander Repiev, “”

Alexander Repiev
Moscow, Russia
www.repiev.ru info@horses.ru

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