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This article extends our knowledge of scientific marketing management and the reasons behind the emergence of the marketing concept. In our narrative, the banking community plays an important role in promoting marketing in the early 20th century. We illuminate this argument using the writings of Fred W. Shibley (1864–1944) and the theoretical resources of Michel Foucault. For Shibley, marketing advanced the interests of corporate financiers, shareholders and employees. Their profit focus was enabled through the marketing concept and accounting practices that mediated hyper- and disciplinary power. In this discourse, organizational relations reflected a pyramidal management of information through a ‘principle of omnivisibility’. These processes individualized departments and affected all employees. Importantly, these control mechanisms were seeded through ‘displacement’. This discursive move reveals a new dimension underwriting the promotion of the marketing concept and the pursuit of profit. These ‘progressive’ facets of marketing theory and practice were invoked to redirect employee attention away from their fractious relationships with management and the owners of capital. Redirecting employee focus was attempted by positioning the consumer as the ‘boss’, with increased production and consumption framed as ‘unpolitical socialism’. While the marketing management literature depicts the marketing concept in quasi-humanistic terms, we unearth the roles of hyper- and disciplinary power, combined with a status-quo orientation that underwrote its promotion in this formative period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1960s, the American milieu has evolved in a way that is at once more tolerant, humane, and progressive on the social and cultural fronts and yet more darkly threatening, unforgiving, and malevolent in our economic and business lives. This article offers a single explanation accounting for these two seemingly divergent phenomena. The all-pervasive, unrelenting power of marketing ideology, with its laser-like focus on the consumer and customer satisfaction, is cited as a contributing agent of change in how the affairs of our public institutions, including universities, are now being conducted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Market orientation (MO) research is beset with conceptual and measurement difficulties. Researchers freely acknowledged these difficulties, but all too often fail to modify their research designs. Modifications to standard MO research designs would help to advance our understanding of the relationship between MO and business performance. More radical extensions would help us understand concepts related to MO, such as sense-making by managers. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article discusses the origins of the idea that a consumer’s choice is equivalent to a citizen’s vote or a juror’s verdict and that markets therefore resemble the political process of a democracy. The idea of the consumer as sovereign driver of the marketplace emerged during the enlightenment. It was, however, the development of market research methods during the 1930s and 1940s, which provided the crucial backdrop for the sudden rise to prominence of an idea that assumes that consumers dictate what is produced through their ‘‘votes,’’ that is, daily choices. Innovations in the measurement of consumer preferences, such as consumer juries, panel surveys, and the program analyzer technique, provided the final touch of scientific credibility to this idea. An understanding of the historical origins and political—philosophical implications of the equation of consumer markets and democracies is of importance for the study of macromarketing because it helped legitimize specific industries that today have come under closer scrutiny for their potentially detrimental impact on the social welfare of consumers, such as the advertising and the entertainment industries. This equation also provided—and still provides—a theoretical underpinning for the marketing concept as a marketing management philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An increasing number of consumers are seeking to lead healthier lives by eating more healthful foods. In the United States, however, some are unknowingly consuming foods that are less healthful and wholesome than they expect. Through information on packages, food marketers draw attention to apparently healthful aspects of foods, while minimizing attention to the less desirable properties. A salient aspect of this situation is that such marketing practices are permissible under rules established by the relevant regulatory agency, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In this sense, the situation constitutes a market failure, which is enabled by a regulatory failure. The political economy framework is used to examine the regulatory failure. The article takes a critical view of certain food marketing practices and argues that, for at least some customers, consumer interests are being subordinated to food firm's interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine relationship marketing from an historical perspective. As a predominantly industrial marketing strategy, reciprocity was adopted by numerous organizations and discussed in detail by marketing scholars from the 1920s until the late 1970s, and these debates indicate that reciprocity was largely relationship marketing orientated in nature. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reciprocity had fallen into disrepute. In its place arose 'trade relations' and trade relations management. Reciprocity was marginalized, this paper documents, due to the focus of the Federal Trade Commission, Justice Department and the Supreme Court on a number of prominent cases of anticompetitive reciprocity. From trade relations, debates pertaining to 'corporate diplomacy', 'diplomatic marriage brokers', 'business relations' and relationship marketing developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The marketing literature has devoted limited attention to the nature and scope of heuristics in marketing theory development and in marketing-related decision-making processes. This is of concern because the use of heuristics can profoundly influence managerial choices and, in turn, the ability of firms to compete. The authors analyze heuristics, first in general terms by providing a review of the concept and its mechanics, and then more specifically by exploring the use of heuristics in the discipline of marketing. The market orientation and marketing concept constructs are discussed as examples of marketing tenets that, over time, have been enriched through the incorporation of heuristics. The following findings are derived from the analysis: heuristics signal the maturing of a theoretical concept; heuristics act as a measure of a discipline's impact; heuristics do not exist in isolation; effective heuristics are balanced and established; and effective heuristics evolve and adapt. Overall, the purpose of this study is to improve the understanding of the value of heuristics to marketing theory and practice and to renew research interest into heuristics in a marketing context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sidney Levy has been one of the main contributors to marketing and consumer behavior in the twentieth century and is a living legend among marketers today. This historical essay will look at how Levy was able to have a substantial impact on the field of marketing by pushing it in new directions. He saw well before others the value of doing research on brand image, symbolism, and cultural meaning in marketing and of broadening the marketing concept. Levy was able to achieve these insights by questioning the prevailing assumptions of the day, by taking an interdisciplinary perspective to solve what he saw as marketing problems, and by encouraging philosophical pluralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The marketing and sales orientations that are basic to our understanding of marketing history and also underlie distinctions about different company philosophies are considered in the light of the works of Hobbes and Rousseau. These philosophical treatises propose contrasting views of the essential nature of mankind that are similar to the implicit assumptions about buyer behaviour that underlie marketing and sales orientations. By extension, we propose that a case exists for the adoption of the marketing concept being considered as the equivalent to the Enlightenment for business practices. Renewed emphasis on the study of the mind in management theory adds weight to the need to make our assumptions about the nature of mankind explicit when we develop concepts and theories in marketing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]