Business and Management

If an organization has customers, it needs to understand marketing. To achieve the best results from marketing requires a subtle blend of art and science. It can also benefit from recommendations for practice rather than lists of options from which to choose. The art of marketing comes from the doing of marketing — implementing programs to attain and retain customers, and seeing what actually works. This is the province of marketing managers, direct marketers, advertisers, and consultants. The examples of good and bad practice used throughout this book illustrate this approach. The science of marketing comes from research — about markets, customers, competitors, and how effectively various types of marketing programs work. This is the province of academics and market researchers. The science of marketing provides the foundations for good marketing practice. Sometimes this science is ignored in the rush to embrace new ideas and technologies. For example, the long scientific history of the adoption and diffusion of innovations says that the Internet will take a long time to fundamentally change the way large numbers of customers buy their products and services. If more managers and investors had understood this, then many dot. coms would not have become dot. bombs. This book blends art and science to provide insight for marketing managers about how to implement marketing more effectively to both create and capture the value of the offers they make to their target customers. In the process it questions the usefulness of some of the more recent marketing fads.

This book shows how to fuse marketing, finance, and other disciplines to improve performance for the corporation or organization. Specifically, it shows decision makers at different levels in the organization and in different functional areas (e.g., marketing, finance, new product development, and human resources management) how to overcome the problems resulting from function- and discipline-based “silos.” The book has several novel features. All concepts are presented in a simple and easily accessible question-and-answer format. The book provides an in-depth analysis of a broad spectrum of important managerial topics (e.g., how to allocate advertising funds between Internet and conventional advertising, how to evaluate brand equity for mergers and acquisitions, and how to coordinate product design, marketing strategy, and production). In addition, because of its fusion-based methodology, the book provides decision makers with new tools to address familiar managerial problems (e.g., resource allocation and the design of managerial contracts in multiproduct or multidivisional firms). Throughout the book, the focus is on providing managers with actionable theories and metrics that are rigorous yet practical, and that allow the firm or organization to fuse — not merely interface — different functional areas.

This book offers a theoretically informed, critical perspective on contemporary marketing practice and its growing cultural, economic, and political influence worldwide. With marketing activities intensifying, the public has become much more aware of its status as consumers. Yet, the relentless visibility of marketing materials and messages in our everyday life contrasts sharply with the mystery surrounding the inner workings of the marketing profession. The silence on the subject is surprising, particularly because the nefarious effects of rampant marketing are widely recognized and marketers are generally identified as key agents in shaping the face of global capitalism. This collection of essays brings together leading scholars and practitioners from the fields of history, business, economic sociology, and cultural anthropology, who share an interest in inspecting the inner workings and outer effects of marketing as a material social practice, an ideology, and a technique. Their work raises some important and timely questions. For example, how has marketing transformed the pharmaceutical industry and what are the consequences for our lives? How does marketing influence the way we think of progress and modernity? How has marketing changed the way we think of childhood? Or, how does marketing appropriate the creativity of consumers for profit? Scholars, policymakers, and practitioners interested in the question of how marketing ‘works’ need to acquire a profound theoretical and conceptual understanding of the institution as well as its practices and believe systems.

This book proposes a novel research agenda for marketing to reconnect with markets. The historical link between marketing and markets, prevalent until the 1960s, gave way to a view of marketing as addressing generic rather than economic exchange. By focusing on generic exchange, marketing portrays itself as portable set of tools applicable to markets and non-markets alike. This book challenges this view, proposing instead a close examination of what makes exchanges economic in nature, and how economic exchanges aggregate to produce markets. By re-establishing the connection between marketing and markets, this book argues that marketing produces markets: marketing practices and theories play a significant role in the production of markets and in the configuration of the entities and phenomena that populate markets. The book brings together scholars from the fields of marketing, organization studies, economic sociology, and science and technology studies, who share an interest in markets as socio-technical constructions and the performative role of academic and lay theories in producing economic orderings. The chapters cover a wide range of empirical settings including consumption, traditional and online retailing, product development, category management, trading zones and obstacles to exchange, business associations and political actors, liberalized markets, loyalty schemes and competition rules, and Fair Trade goods. These chapters illustrate the variety of agents, beyond buyers and sellers, that partake in the construction of markets such as the specialist trade press, business associations, regulatory bodies, and NGOs.