A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Marketing

Citation

Brown, S. (2007), "A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Marketing", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 41 No. 11/12, pp. 1546-1550. https://doi.org/10.1108/03090560710821305

1 A very short, fairly interesting and reasonably cheerful review

They say that Wroe Alderson never judged a marketing book by its cover. He judged it by its index instead. Apparently, the great guru's first action was to turn to the back of the book and if its index contained the all‐important words “Alderson, Wroe”, he was sufficiently impressed to start reading. If, unforgivably, it failed to mention His Marketing Highness, Wroe closed the book and read no further (Halbert, 2006, p. 427).

For some unfathomable reason, Alderson's egocentric approach to reviewing is revered by his manifold admirers, the so‐called Aldersonanists. It is seen as an endearing signifier of the superlative marketer's all‐too‐human idiosyncrasies, alongside his chauvinism, parsimony, bar‐room philosophising and swinish table manners, presumably (see Wooliscroft, 2006, pp. 7, 11, 12, 20). Personally, I have always considered Wroe's narcissistic reviewing technique to be proof positive of unspeakable arrogance, a sure sign that Alderson was full of it, basically. Indeed, you only have to peruse his famous list of 150 allegedly testable propositions – most of which are either inane or insane – to realise that the guru of gurus was a self‐regarding b********r of the highest order.

However, on reading A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Marketing, I had what can only be described as a Wroe Moment. The third chapter of Jim Blythe's book is devoted to marketing gurus, Alderson among them, and it contains a section on a certain Stephen Brown. My first thought, naturally enough, was that this referred to Stephen W. Brown, the renowned services marketing scholar from Arizona State University. I have often been mistaken for Stephen W. and I am always happy to take credit for his publications while simultaneously pinning my unspeakable postmodern utterances upon the innocent Arizonian. But, believe it or not, Blythe's hall of marketing fame really does include a substantial section on yours truly.

My second thought, as you can imagine, was “What have I done to deserve this?” Granted, my generous contribution to Blythe's benevolent fund (based in a little‐known Manx holiday resort called tax haven), to say nothing of copious free gifts of illicit, poteen‐like substances, may well have swayed Jim's decision (swayed being the operative word). Still, the inclusion of Stephen Brown alongside iconic marketing thinkers like Phil Kotler, Ted Levitt, Peter Drucker and, gasp, Shelby Hunt, seems somewhat perverse not to say downright perverted. Mind you, Malcolm McDonald is included as well, so Jim's judgement clearly leaves a lot to be desired (unless, of course, the Cranfield Oracle has also made a sizeable deposit in the BBF).

My third thought, it almost goes without saying, was “what has the so‐and‐so written about me?” Well folks, it seems that I invented the Wheel of Retailing theory, which will be news to the late great Malcolm P. McNair (1958), not to mention the equally late great Stanley C. Hollander (1960). It also maintains that I am the academic equivalent of a “box of fireworks”, which I suppose is a polite way of suggesting that I'm a lazy b*****d who needs a rocket up the a**e. My dean wouldn't disagree there. It likewise contends that I have a thing about … ahem … “paradoxical juxtaposition”. This, I assume, is some kind of perverted yoga position or raunchy Pilates routine and, while I am willing to give paradoxical juxtaposition a go, I am not sure if the old appendages are up to it. Best of all, Blythe blithely describes me as the – wait for it – “performing flea of British marketing”. True, it could have been a lot worse, given that the dung beetle was a metaphorical option, as were malarial mosquitoes, parasitic leeches, intestinal tapeworms and the like. But, let's be honest, “performing flea” is not the kind of commendation you can include in the Evidence of Esteem section of the impending RAE document. God only knows what he would have called me if my blank cheque had not cleared.

Despite Blythe's deeply scurrilous and utterly unwarranted attack on my academic probity, I refuse to respond in kind. A Very Short (for short) is a fun read, a commendably quirky addition to the me‐too textbook market. At 133 pages, A Very Short is undeniably short and, at £12.99, it is quite reasonably priced. In my humble opinion, however, “fairly interesting” hardly does justice to its many admirable qualities. Indeed, if forced to choose between Alderson's over‐rated ramblings and Blythe's insightful analysis, I am on the side of the legendary Irish rhymester who reviewed Alderson's Dynamic Marketing Behavior as follows:

There once was a scholar called WroeWhose writings were awfully … slowHe then wrote a bookOh, the effort it tookIf only Wroe'd let his prose flow.

Irreverent limericks notwithstanding, the salient point about A Very Short is that it is, in essence, a primer on marketing thought. Chapter one covers marketing's economic antecedents (yes, Adam Smith's spick‐and‐span pin factory is present and correct); Chapter two discusses our discipline's debt to the behavioural sciences (do n't tell Indiana Jones but archaeology, apparently, is a branch of anthropology); Chapter three showcases the profound thoughts of marketing's home‐grown gurus (plus the not‐so‐profound thoughts of certain intellectual interlopers); Chapter four nibbles on the notoriously knobbly chestnut “What is marketing?” (don't go there, Jim – arrrghh, too late!); and Chapter five is a culminating plea for common sense, managerially‐oriented pragmatism rather than airy‐fairy, artsy‐fartsy philosophising (rough translation, “out‐postmodernists‐out”).

A Very Short, in short, does exactly what it says on the tin. Errant gurus excepted, it doesn't include anything that can't be found in more learned analyses of marketing theory/thought (Bartels, 1976; Hunt, 2002, Sheth et al., 1988). But whereas Blythe's competitors are occasionally heavy‐going and as often as not incomprehensible, A Very Short is good fun from start to finish. Its author is a wonderfully amiable, eminently sensible guide to the highways and byways of marketing thought. Unlike many commentators on theoretical matters, he never loses sight of his target audience of marketing undergraduates and he's not averse to calling a scholarly spade a scholarly spade or putting the boot into the 4Ps paradigm:

Marketing's relationship with real sciences has been basically the same as that between ram raiders and retailers. Marketing academics have run in, grabbed some useful ideas, and run out again never to return (p. 54).

For a while in the 1990s there was a fashion for adding more Ps as the shortcomings of the model became clearer. A lot of marketing journals in the 1990s have papers entitled “Pork chops – the fifth P of marketing?”, or something similar, but the vast majority of research output and the vast majority of marketing textbooks follow the 4P approach (p. 62).

Blythe, what's more, is often deliciously politically incorrect on occasion, though the obese police might take exception to his beer‐swilling, sandwich‐guzzling caricature of a “fat friend” (p. 20). He also interlards his agreeably digressive narrative with personal anecdotes, pertinent experiences and so forth, which ensure that A Very Short largely avoids the abstract, abstruse, often absurd pontificating that plagues books of this type:

Recently, I took out a credit card because they offered me an interest‐free six months. I used the money to make a major purchase, knowing that I had a royalty check due in before the six months was up and I could pay off the card and cancel it. In effect, I was bringing the purchase forward by six months – instant gratification at the expense of the finance company. After I cancelled the card and paid it off, I had a very nice call from the credit card company begging me to reconsider – even though I had, in effect, cheated them out of around £500 in interest payments. Why do they do this? Why do they act like a lovesick teenager, hanging around the ex‐girlfriend's house after being dumped? I suspect it is because they have been on a customer retention course, and have not realised that some customers are not worth having (p. 95)

Actually, the thing I like most about Blythe's book is that it consistently foregrounds the human side of marketing. Marketing is a people‐populated phenomenon – it is done by and for people, the likes of you and me – yet all too often the crooked timber of humanity gets pared, planed and polished to the point where real people are unrecognisable. There are, of course, sensible “scientific” reasons for this seemingly disinterested, allegedly objective approach, but it comes at a cost. It produces a discipline that is sterile, impersonal and increasingly out of touch with the very things it purports to describe and explain.

A Very Short, however, doesn't suffer from this particular shortcoming. Just about every thinker that stalks the pages of Blythe's book is introduced with a strange‐but‐true, warts‐and‐all, not‐a‐lot‐of‐people‐know‐that biographical factlet, or several. John Stuart Mill was a love machine; Francis Ysidro Edgeworth had a fling with Beatrix Potter, Sigmund Freud was a coke fiend; Philip Kotler is an “affable old cove”, Stephen Brown is a “performing flea” and what have you. Wroe Alderson's book reviewing technique doesn't get a mention, admittedly, but his unreadable writing does.

If I had to be critical – and reviewers have to be critical, if only to prove that they're qualified to pass judgement – I suppose I can persuade myself to pick a couple of nits, albeit reluctantly. The structure of the book may prove off‐putting for some students, insofar as there's a lot of essentially background material to get through before A Very Short gets to grips with marketing matters. The first two chapters, on economics and the behavioural sciences, take up almost 40 per cent of the text and, although Blythe is an avuncular guide, readers belonging to the where's‐the‐beef brigade might prefer something juicier earlier on.

Blythe, similarly, is witheringly dismissive of the Wheel of Retailing theory (“it does not stand up well to close examination”), yet in what can only be described as a perfect paradoxical juxtaposition, he makes inadvertent use of the wheel theory in his climactic analysis of why marketing doesn't work. He uses it on three sequential occasions, in fact, in a kind of Tricycle of Retailing Theory:

The major American car manufacturers competed to provide ever‐larger, ever‐better equipped, ever more opulent vehicles. What happened? The Japanese entered the US market with smaller, cheaper, more economical cars and clobbered the big manufacturers.

Airlines offer another example. Major airlines offered more comfortable seating, more legroom, better in‐flight meals, faster check‐ins in an effort to outperform their rivals. Customers ate the in‐flight meals, ogled the stewardesses, drank the free booze, watched the in‐flight movies, and then booked with easyJet next time because it's cheaper. There's no in‐flight meal, and you have to have a punch‐up with your fellow passengers to get a window seat, but hey, it's half the price.

We have had nearly 40 years of marketing academics teaching students to differentiate, segment, find the USP, add value, and even (oo‐er) delight the customer, and what do customers do? Buy the cheapest. Adam Smith must be chortling away to himself somewhere (p. 125).

I think you mean Malcolm P. McNair, Jim, or possibly Stan Hollander. Give credit where it's due.

In addition to Blythe's once, twice, three times a theory, A Very Short suffers from its underpinning presumption that the academic grass is always greener elsewhere. Marketing's ongoing intellectual in‐fighting; its inability to reach universally agreed definitions; its lamentable lack of “proper” scientific standing and suchlike are presented by Blythe as very bad things, things that don't afflict other, more mature, longer established, commendably scientific academic disciplines. Speaking personally, I'm inclined to believe that on‐going intellectual debate is a good thing. I also suspect that adjacent disciplines are just as divided and disputatious as we are, possibly more so. I for one don't subscribe to the view that ‘proper’ scientific status is an appropriate aim for marketing endeavour, much less the Holy Grail that Blythe imagines it to be. Indeed, despite the consistently downbeat view that A Very Short erroneously subscribes to, the reality is that marketing is a stupendously successful academic discipline. The student enrolments, the proliferating professorships and, yes, the burgeoning textbook sales speak for themselves. We must be doing something right.

These are minor quibbles, however. A Very Short is gratifyingly succinct, relentlessly interesting and, while I fear few students will consider £12.99 “reasonably cheap” (for a 133‐page book, that is), it's still a damn sight cheaper than the Big Fat Books About Marketing that they're ordinarily required to buy. A Very Short is no substitute for BFBAMs and I'm sure it's not to everyone's taste. But it's an excellent appetiser all the same. Enjoy.