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VIEWPOINT Marketing is
everything
Marketing is everything: the view
from the street
11
Michael Saren
University of Leicester, Leicester, UK Received October 2006
Accepted October 2006
Abstract
Purpose – To show how the conceptual framework of the marketing discipline can be radically
revised and rethought, to be better in tune with the realities of the producer-consumer relationship in
advanced societies in the twenty-first century.
Design/methodology/approach – Commissioned as a viewpoint, with permission to “think aloud”.
Findings – Marketing thinkers need to broaden their horizons, look at the marketing phenomenon as
consumers experience it, and be prepared to learn from research conducted far beyond the confines of
conventional marketing theory. Specifically, the present-day context of marketing demands increased
attention to the relatively familiar concept of relationship marketing and the so far relatively unknown
perspective called “critical marketing”.
Research limitations/implications – There is much integrative work to be done in effectively
integrating the wide range of theoretical inputs required to explain what “marketing” means today.
Practical implications – Though the rethinking advocated may be challenging for marketing
practitioners, the readings cited provide means for marketing educators to build the conceptual
frameworks into applicable research and useful learning.
Originality/value – A glimpse of the future.
Keywords Marketing, Relationship marketing, Critical marketing
Paper type Viewpoint
Where’s the horizon?
Most academic authors discuss marketing as a business discipline, from a managerial
point of view: how to “do” marketing in companies and other organizations. But marketing
as a subject is not just about being a marketing manager. On the contrary, the discipline is
nowadays all-encompassing. Everything and anything is marketed – religion, politics,
science, history; celebrities, careers, sport, art, fiction, fact. Marketing affects everybody
because, as consumers, we cannot escape the market, even those of us who try to live the
simple life (Hill, 2002; Holt, 1998).
Marketing is not just an economic activity. It drives the consumer society, a culture
of consumption. Many contemporary commentators have pointed to marketing as one
of the key cultural architects of our time. They suggest that, since the 1950s, it has
come to play a significant role in the creation, maintenance and reproduction of tastes,
dreams, aspirations, needs, identities, desires, morality and hedonism. The abundance
of marketing messages and signs for which the so-called “culture industries” are Marketing Intelligence & Planning
Vol. 25 No. 1, 2007
responsible in everyday life may even qualify marketing professionals to carry the label pp. 11-16
“ministers of propaganda of the consumer culture” (Hirschman and Holbrook, 1982; q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0263-4503
Hirschmann, 2000). DOI 10.1108/02634500710722362

2. MIP Marketing may appear to affect more and more of the world nowadays, but its
25,1 powerful effects are not new. Over the centuries, trade, exchange – what we now call
marketing – influenced how and why empires were built, technologies were applied,
property law was developed, transport routes were constructed, languages developed
and spread and the architecture of cities coped with shopping.
12 Friend of foe?
Research by authors such as Elliott and Wattanasuwan (1998) shows that consumers
are not passive recipients of what marketers do. They re-interpret marketing messages;
display maker’s logos on products consumed; “present” themselves though what they
consume; make choices; complain; window-shop; view celebrities as brands; compete
with other consumers. Marketing needs to be studied and explained as consumers
experience it, as active participants in it. This requires a clear perspective on marketing
as a social and cultural phenomenon, not just as a business function. We academics
also need to understand how consumers, organizations and society can and do use
marketing – for example, in areas of social marketing and the construction of
consumer “identity”.
The study and teaching of marketing has to move beyond the structure that has
traditionally been imposed on it, reflecting the so-called core marketing functions:
advertising, distribution, strategy, sales, product development, and so on. Even if we
were to remain primarily concerned with the managerial aspects of the subject, we
should at least move beyond these “old” functional categories and start to view afresh
how companies and managers think about and set about marketing in the real world of
marketing practice. In any case, the old marketing concepts are highly gendered. They
adopt – for reasons I could never understand – the militarized language of strategy
and tactics, campaigns and offensives, intelligence and planning, control and
implementation, targeting, market penetration, winning customers, beating
competitors.
The question is how can we rethink these notions and achieve a broader perspective
on marketing? The are a couple of possibilities.
The rise and rise of relationship marketing
One way of achieving a different perspective on the subject is to study marketing from
a relational perspective. This entails looking at how actors and organisations relate to
each other in and through marketing. The rationale for what is nowadays called
“relationship marketing” is that few businesses, or people, can do everything by
themselves, so the building of relationships is a key element in marketing, indeed the
key element. Increasingly, companies realise that customers are their most important
asset, and view customer relationships as opportunities that need to be managed.
The essential aim of relationship marketing strategies is of course value creation for
both parties through relationships and even partnerships in the marketplace. The most
important of these is usually with customers, but no-one should neglect other
stakeholders and partners who can influence and support companies’ marketing
operations.
Webster (1992) has much that is wise to say on this subject:
There has been a shift from a transactions to a relationship focus . . . From an academic or
theoretical perspective, the relatively narrow conceptualisation of marketing as a

3. profit-maximisation problem, focused on market transactions, seems increasingly out of Marketing is
touch with an emphasis on long term customer relationships and the formation and
management of strategic alliances . . . The focus shifts from products and firms as units of everything
analysis to people, organisations, and the social processes that bind actors together in
ongoing relationships.
The relationship marketing concept has attracted attention and grown in popularity
significantly over the last decade or so, particularly since the seminal articles in USA 13
by Webster, as just cited, and Morgan and Hunt (1994). Its roots reach back, however,
to academic studies of the conditions and behaviour in industrial and services
marketing in Europe in the 1970s, notably in Sweden and Finland. The key finding was
that long-term relationships between buyers and seller were particularly important to
each party, and the conclusion that they were also critical in explaining marketing
behaviour and the development of markets. This was labelled the interaction approach
by the influential Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) group.
In the UK, Ford (2004) has interpreted it this way:
The interaction approach is based on the idea that business markets aren’t made up of a large
number of individually insignificant customers. Nor do they consist simply of action by
suppliers – who assemble a Marketing mix and launch it towards a group of passive buyers,
whose only reaction is to chose whether or not to buy. Instead the process is one of interaction
between active buyers and sellers that are individually significant to each other.
Considering that interaction between parties is one of the most important drivers of
relationships, it seems astonishing that 30 years of evolution have resulted in little
more than references to the “Nordic School” and the concept of interaction in the
business-to-business literature. The protagonists themselves now recognize the need
for further development of the construct and its theoretical underpinnings (Ford and
˚
Hakansson, 2006). Nevertheless, a strength of the construct as it stands is that
researchers’ and managers’ attention is focused on the relationships without
necessarily privileging the firm above the so-called “sovereign” customers. Indeed,
the original ethos was precisely that of a “win-win” outcome for both parties to
the transaction (Moller and Halinen, 2000).
“Critical” marketing
What I have called “critical marketing” extends its domain beyond the traditional
managerial and business confines, and beyond the familiar critique of unethical
marketing practices, to analytical questioning of established, traditional marketing
theories and the assumptions behind them. In the broader field of management in
general, theorists have gathered together since 1999 in an international conference
series in Critical Management Studies, held bi-annually in the UK. As the convenor of
the marketing stream convenor at all five conferences to date, I feel qualified to observe
that marketing has lagged some way behind other academic management disciplines
in this arena, both in volume and visibility. Some ground has been made up recently, in
a series of seminars in the UK between late 2004 and 2006, for which a “Group of Six”
British marketing academics received funding from the Economic and Social Research
Council.
The seminars were conceived as a means of bringing together scholars from a
variety of disciplinary backgrounds and a number of countries, to foster a stronger

4. MIP critical forum within the academic marketing community. The proceedings
25,1 demonstrate the debate and controversy surrounding the meaning and use of the
term “critical” and consequently around “critical marketing”. The organisers did not
intend to be prescriptive, or to define our understanding of such terms too precisely in
advance. Instead, we wanted the seminars to open up a space where scholars and
marketing practitioners could discuss, argue and negotiate. The prefix “critical” is used
14 to signal that authors who take this standpoint subscribe to one of a number of radical
philosophies and theories, which seek to make explicit certain ideologies and
assumptions underlying the production of knowledge, the marketing and management
processes, and the wider context of socio-economic relations within which those
activities labelled as “marketing” occur.
One illustration of how a consumer-centred, critical view of what constitutes a
marketing phenomenon can provide new insights into customer behaviour is provided
by the recent stream of research asserting that the human body itself is the site of all
consumption. The act of consumption is “embodied” taking place in and through the
body. Sensory organ must “ingest” signs, symbols, messages and things, taking them
into the body, which is thus “contaminated” by the object of consumption.
This conceptual framework has yet to gain wide currency in marketing. Lest it
sounds a little too postmodern, consider how much consumer and marketing activity is
centred on the body and consumers’ view of their own bodies – adornment, clothing,
perfumery, cosmetics, tattoos, piercing, surgical and dental “enhancement” and so on.
The use of products and services to “improve” one’s “body image” is a means of
identity construction using the body as a site of consumption. Identity is often related
nowadays to the consumption of particular beauty, health-care and cosmetic products.
People’s identities and self-esteem are so closely associated with their bodies that they
can strongly motivate the choice of foods, diet, sports, fitness, and medical and surgical
products aimed at affecting or changing body-image.
Some consumer behaviour researchers have recently taken interest this aspect of
symbolic consumption – for instance, Thompson and Hirschman (1995). A particular
focus has been the role of the “embodied self” (Mauss, 1979), including studies of
cosmetic surgery and body art (Velliquette and Bamossy, 2001). The field of body
modification provides a wealth of possible case studies for understanding the degree of
consumer involvement both in the production, creation and consumption of a new
highly visible “identity”.
This single, very specific example of a framework for analysis of consumption
behaviour demonstrates how any attempt to provide a comprehensive treatment of
marketing as an academic discipline must encompass the wide range of activities and
effects that it manifests in practice today. It is not possible to make all the traditional
marketing theories and concepts fit this broad agenda. That requires an alternative
approach, which sets the subject in its wider contexts and draws on relevant ideas from
associated literature beyond conventional marketing. It also calls into question the
conventional view of “relevance” in marketing, reaching beyond managers’ and firms’
direct interests to encompass consumer, social and public policy implications. As
Wensley (2007) will point out, this questioning should take place in the context of
critical marketing itself:
Within the critical approach, the issue of relevance and impact is frequently seen as
problematic. This is particularly true of fields such as management and marketing, where

5. relevance itself has often been defined in a restricted manner to imply usefulness as measured Marketing is
by a sub-group of either practitioners or self-selected intermediaries . . . We can recognise
there are also questions to be asked about the basis and purpose of critical approaches in everything
marketing.
So what now? 15
Some of you may well be wondering exactly how the relational and (particularly)
critical approaches to the subject can be adopted in mainstream marketing practice.
That requires a fundamental reappraisal of what constitutes marketing activity by
strategists and planners. We are past the point of believing that it can be reduced and
simplified into a set of point-by-point managerial prescriptions. For those of you who
think it might be intriguing or even useful to take all this further, the readings in the
references will provide stimulating tasters of the rethinking required.
References
Elliott, R. and Wattanasuwan, K. (1998), “Brands as resources for the symbolic construction of
identity”, International Journal of Advertising, Vol. 17 No. 2.
Ford, D. (2004), “The IMP group and international marketing”, International Marketing Review,
Vol. 21 No. 2, pp. 139-41.
˚
Ford, D. and Hakansson, H. (2006), “The idea of business interaction”, The IMP Journal, Vol. 1
No. 1, pp. 4-27.
Hill, R.P. (2002), “Consumer culture and the culture of poverty: implications for marketing theory
and practice”, Marketing Theory, Vol. 2 No. 3, pp. 273-93.
Hirschmann, E.C. (2000), Heroes, Monsters and Messiahs: Movies and Television Shows as the
Mythology of American Culture, Andrew McMeel, Kansas City, MO.
Hirschman, E.C. and Holbrook, M.B. (1982), “The experiential aspects of consumption: consumer
fantasies, feelings and fun”, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 9 No. 2, pp. 132-40.
Holt, D.B. (1998), “Does cultural capital structure American consumption?”, Journal of Consumer
Research, Vol. 25 No. 1.
Mauss, M. (1979), Body Techniques in Sociology and Psychology, Routledge and Kegan Paul,
London, (Trans. B. Brewster).
Moller, K. and Halinen, A. (2000), “Relationship marketing theory: its roots and direction”,
Journal of Marketing Management, Vol. 16 Nos 1/3, pp. 29-54.
Morgan, R.M. and Hunt, S.D. (1994), “The commitment-trust theory of relationship marketing”,
Journal of Marketing, Vol. 58 No. 3, pp. 20-38.
Thompson, C. and Hirschman, E.C. (1995), “‘Understanding the socialized body: a
poststructuralist analysis of consumers’ self conceptions, body images and self-care
practices”, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 32 No. 2, pp. 139-53.
Velliquette, A. and Bamossy, G. (2001), “The role of body adornment and the self-reflexive body
in life-style cultures and identity”, European Advances in Consumer Research, Vol. 5, p. 21.
Webster, F.E. (1992), “The changing role of marketing in the corporation”, Journal of Marketing,
Vol. 56 No. 4, pp. 1-17.
The Gang of Six Wensley, R. (2007), “Relevance of critique: can and should critical marketing
influence practice and policy?”, Critical Marketing: Defining the Field, Elsevier, Oxford
(in press).

6. MIP Further reading
25,1 Saren, M. (2006), Marketing Graffiti, Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford.
Vargo, S.L. and Lusch, R.F. (2004), “Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing”,
Journal of Marketing, Vol. 68 No. 1, pp. 1-17.
Corresponding author
16 Michael Saren can be contacted at: majs1@le.ac.uk
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