Rethinking Marketing: Towards Critical Marketing Accountings

Citation

Perry, C. (2000), "Rethinking Marketing: Towards Critical Marketing Accountings", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 34 No. 1/2, pp. 223-226. https://doi.org/10.1108/ejm.2000.34.1_2.223.1

Rethinking Marketing explores what marketing is and where it is going, and is a very important book for all marketing faculty because it is so wide‐ranging, cutting‐edge and thought‐provoking. It is a book of readings and commentaries by 25 very distinguished contributors, well‐edited by four leading UK academics. These many people make it a thoughtful and carefully referenced exploration of ideas, with balance provided by the commentaries on the 11 chapters in its six parts and by the editors’ introductions to the book and to each part.

Essentially, the book argues that the social, historical and political contexts of marketing exchanges are important but they have been neglected in favour of a narrow and misplaced focus on the managerial manipulation of consumers. In effect, it argues that a critical theory scientific paradigm is most appropriate for marketing. For example, a consumer should no longer be considered merely to have a response to certain stimuli; rather, the consumer’s social connections within a particular social context, like a festival, for example, should be the focus of marketing’s interest. While arguing this thesis, the book raises so many related issues that reading it becomes a series of interconnected, exciting, intellectual journeys.

The book itself appears to be the result of a journey. The idea for the book was born at a Rethinking Marketing Symposium in July 1993, and the book’s arrival after six years of writing and re‐writing does indeed reveal what the editors say is “a wide range of provocative ideas and perspectives [about] a variety of Marketing topics” (p. 2). That some of the contributors are non‐marketers and come from organisation and strategy disciplines helps to add breadth to the discussion. The mixture of breadth and depth in the book can best be gauged if each of the six parts is dipped into in this review, to show how wide‐ranging, cutting‐edge and thought‐provoking it is.

Part I is about marketing philosophy and what an arresting first act it is. The editors initially summarise Shelby Hunt’s attack on relativism. Then Stephen Brown gives another of his dazzling intellectual performances while showing how marketing and postmodernism are related, and how Shelby Hunt is wrong. This “academic version of gladiatorial combat” (p. 24) between two very assured marketing academics has “contradictions” which make for some excitement in this example of “disciplinary bread and circuses” (p. 61).

This kind of “spectacle” (p. 61) provokes thought. I wonder if the choice is not just between positivism (or classical realism) and critical theory (which I presume is similar to Brown’s postmodernism), because a third paradigm of critical or fallibilistic realism is available which incorporates elements of the other two into a cohesive and coherent worldview appropriate for investigating social science phenomena (Easton, 1998; Perry et al., 1998). This paradigm is briefly described on p. 26 but its possible implications for marketing do not appear to have been recognised.

From this book’s viewpoint, one advantage of operating within this realism paradigm is its emphasis on the dynamics and context of phenomena, and their consequent causal tendencies rather than more positivistic X → Y causes. In addition, a rigorous case study research methodology is available to work within it, as is structural equation modelling of survey data. Perhaps the book could have been improved by placing itself more clearly among the competing paradigms of science (for example, Guba and Lincoln, 1994).

Let us move on to Part II of the book. This part is an appropriate lead‐in to the following parts because its two chapters and a commentary (by Europeans) emphasise a shift from the current managerial emphasis of marketing to the “social embeddedness” of the parties involved in an exchange: “… the effective marketing of the postmodern era is not to accept and exploit consumers in their contemporary individualization, as Anglo‐Saxons [that is, Americans?] might. Rather the future of Marketing is in offering a renewed sense of community” (p. 62).

In turn, Part III considers how consumers should be considered in market and marketing research. It suggests a move away from considering the consumer as a rational, information processor to considering the consumers’ meanings and self‐identity based on ethnographic and phenomenological research. One paper uses this sort of research to explore what time means for men and for women.

Part IV’s treatment of marketing ethics is also refreshingly different. Based on the book’s emphasis of the social context of a marketing exchange, the two contributors say that as capitalistic markets expand across the globe, they penetrate and deform the social relationships between people. The contributors say this is a rather dark picture which must be faced. Thankfully for an optimist like myself, one of the commentaries in this part is not so depressing because it notes that “successful marketing is a continuing cycle of reciprocal relationships [which are] increasingly open to ethical concern and influence” (p. 181). The other commentary sums up part IV in a way that also applies to the book as a whole:

Marketing’s implicit value and ethical premises are picked out and picked over – using critical theory as tools. Such enquiry exposes Marketing as perpetuating something that has a bitter as well as a sweet effect on our social order, so the examination must continue (p. 189).

Part V is another demonstration of this book’s wide‐ranging coverage of issues – it looks at the marketing profession both in academia and in practice. This is an important but often overlooked issue for marketing academia. The number of jobs for our graduates is declining, and there is some evidence that a marketing degree is more useful for a successful marketing career than a degree with no marketing in it (Lamont and Friedman, 1997). The part’s first chapter gets stuck into marketing academics’ erroneous strategies of depth and breadth. The depth strategy refers to scientism or positivism, that is, “the production of relatively trivial and contingent types of knowledge dedicated to the crude manipulation of human response” (p. 186). This book is certainly not a party to this strategy. The breadth strategy is Kotler and Levy’s (1978) claim that marketing covers all types of exchange.

The other chapter analyses a case study of how marketers and engineers fought for power over time in a Finnish company, with both professions harming the firm in the process. The commentator rightly notes that a part of the solution to the issues the two contributors raise is the concept of relationship marketing, for marketing needs “to benefit from the richness of human relations rather than exploit them” (p. 225). This part of the book provoked me to think that marketing’s gradual decline as a profession will only be halted when we also consider our relationships with other professions, as well as with customers. All in all, this was another interesting leg in this book’s intellectual journey (but the mention of relationship marketing in this part did make me wonder why relationship marketing and network research was not mentioned more often in the book, for that research has made some attempt to include the social context of exchanges).

The final part of the book deals with marketing pedagogy, with how marketing is taught. The first contribution shows how researchers, lecturers and practitioners consider segmentation differently. The second contribution is a very comprehensive treatment of trends and recommendations for the future of research in marketing (which should be compulsory reading for every incipient marketing PhD candidate). Like the other parts of the book, this final part leaves one delighted and invigorated.

In brief, this important book should be read by everyone who has enough intellectual curiosity to step outside a mainstream of marketing thought and practice and wonder where and how we are going. By “step outside a mainstream”, I do not mean that this book is written by a bunch of marginalised whingers on the sidelines of world marketing. This book is a collection of calmly‐argued pieces, by established marketing academics from Europe and the USA who provide comprehensive references, all fitted around the theme that the social context of marketing exchanges must be a foundation for further advancement of the discipline we all love. Please read it and think about it, for our profession’s sake!