Within-country Diversity

It was during the gloomy days of the Great Depression of the early 1930s, when people generally agreed that governments should intervene, that Professor William Harold Hutt, an economist and Professor of Commerce at the University of Cape Town, first proposed the notion of “consumer sovereignty”. Hutt (1940) eschewed the primacy of government, capital, labour, and other custodians of community resources and instead argued that consumers should hold primary power and allocate scarce resources. He clung tenaciously to this principle despite stiff criticism in the literature, and little encouragement outside it. Consumer sovereignty was a strange idea in an era dominated by the production orientation. The sales orientation was a “new and coming thing” that would not see its apex until post-Second World War prosperity. Even if the portrayal of the shortcomings of both orientations in Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Death of a Salesman did resonate with consumers in the early 1950s, it was not until a decade later that the notion of consumer sovereignty began to influence managerial thinking and the first marketing textbooks appeared.