ABSTRACT

Because demarketing has been virtually ignored in the half-century since Kotler and Levy first coined the word, there have been few attempts to develop a working conceptual framework for its study, and (perhaps more important) its applications to practice. Marketing practitioners are certainly familiar with the general idea of what demarketing is – either because they are actively engaged in discouraging unwanted customers or because they have made a marketing gaffe, which has resulted in lost business – but the terminology is not in current use in the same way as (for example) segmentation or branding, which are of course critical concepts in marketing management. We even lack a clear typology of demarketing – the one provided by Kotler and Levy was a good starting point, but still lacks a rigorous definition for each type.