The Role of Marketing and the Firm

The Role of Marketing and the Firm

Introduction

The role of marketing and the firm has been evolving for almost a century, ever since marketing was first recognized as a distinct activity. Putting marketing within the context of the firm is a fairly recent development from an historical perspective. Prior to that, it was regarded as a socioeconomic process taking place within markets, not firms. It was identified as a distinct management function in the 1920s, and since then has experienced continued elaboration as both management practice and academic discipline. Most recently, the idea of marketing as a separate management function is being challenged and modified dramatically by a new conceptualization of marketing as a set of organizational processes that pervades the whole firm, and is not the sole responsibility of marketing managers. Our field is very much a field in intellectual and practical transition, as evidenced by the changing role of marketing in the firm (Aaby, 2009).

Marketing was recognized as a set of human activities long before it was identified with the firm. Obviously, people had been doing many of the things we call 'marketing' long before it was given a name. Even before the earliest commercial traders, who might be considered to be the first marketing firms (most of the great voyages of discovery were launched in search for goods to be traded), people were undoubtedly exchanging things such as one type of food, tool, or clothing for another. For most of history, marketing was thought of as a societal, economic process through which goods and services were exchanged between buyers and sellers, activities that even preceded the existence of money and a market economy.

Competing Views Of The Role Of Marketing

There have been many conceptualizations of marketing. These different viewpoints prove to be useful in understanding the evolution of marketing as a management and business activity within the firm and as a relationship between buying and selling firms.

There has been a kind of 'border war' among competing interests in both the academic and business worlds about the proper boundaries for the field. In both practice and theory there has been an on-going struggle to define marketing as an academic intellectual domain on the one hand, and as a management function with prescribed scope of organizational responsibility and authority on the other. On the academic side, marketing as a discipline, which arguably has its roots in economics, overlaps with many other fields including psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, organization theory, strategic management, and quality management.

For a time in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a trend in academia to define marketing in terms of its analytical tools and techniques, especially mathematical and statistical modeling and behavioral theory. Today, it appears that the debate has been resolved in favor of those who argue; following the logic of philosopher of science Karl Popper (1963), that marketing is defined by the problems it studies and attempts to resolve rather than its techniques or its subject ...