Setting the Marketing Scene

Marketing is many things to many people, and our view of it is framed by the contexts in which we encounter it. For critics, marketing is a field of thought and practice that has become closely identified with humbug and hyperbole.1 We might have an enduring fascination with the way it tantalizes us with fantasies of self-realization, but in general, marketing receives a bad press for its trite theories, its impudent techniques, and its tendency to sneak uninvited into every corner of life. In the developed world, we could hardly deny that marketing has contributed to a level of material affl uence that our grandparents would have thought utterly enviable. Yet, few of us would say that it makes us happier or more fulfilled, and our attempts to understand how marketing really works are patchy, at best. Even for the marketing cognoscenti, the state of the field seems poorly articulated. Marketing’s “how-to” management books offer characteristically underargued and overgeneralized prescriptions, typically juxtaposed with carefully edited, but “so-what?” case examples. Academics don’t do much better — marketing’s academic researchers produce huge volumes of esoteric findings that rarely seem to connect with the everyday priorities of managers and consumers. More often than not, stand-out marketing innovations simply don’t seem to fit conventional text book explanations. All in all, marketing is a huge economic and cultural presence with far reaching implications for us all, yet we still don’t understand nearly enough about this familiar yet enigmatic subject.