The rhetoric and reality of marketing in South Korea

‘The limit of my language is the limit of my world’, wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein (1921). This statement becomes even more true when subjects are communicated and disseminated across different languages and different cultures. For example, if a term or a concept were to migrate abroad to where it had never before existed, it would probably be understood differently from its original meaning. For instance, do Westerners really understand ‘Zen’? There are perhaps very few Westerners who understand the real meaning of ‘Zen’, and those who think they may understand probably have different interpretations of the meaning. The analogy holds true with the application of the concept of marketing in Korea. When S.R. Oh published Marketing Principles for the first time in Korea in 1963, he defined ‘marketing’ in the same manner as the National Association of Marketing Teachers (NAMT) did in 1935. Until very recently Korean textbooks and articles adopted a concept and definition of marketing transposed directly from the USA, as defined by the American Marketing Association and Philip Kotler (Chae, 1985). The academic field had been moving slowly in Korea as there had not been much need for marketing up until 1963. Until that time Koreans were more concerned about survival and escaping from starvation due to the serious shortage of commodities after the Korean War. There was no need for the marketing of products in this environment.