ABSTRACT
Ever since a debate in the late 1960s between professors Kotler, Levy and Luck (Kotler and Levy, 1969; Luck, 1969) and the appearance of an article in 1972 entitled ‘A Generic Concept of Marketing’ (Kotler, 1972), argument has raged over the legitimacy of applying marketing concepts and techniques in such fields as education, religion, politics and employment. Marketing, in effect, had become central to the analysis of human behaviour, exceptional in representing itself as expert in the management of every conceivable kind of transaction within organisations as well as between organisations and their stakeholders (Willmott, 1999). Hitherto people were engaged as voters, students, passengers, patients, churchgoers. Now they are to be seen as consumers. In the view of one critic, ‘the entire universe appears to have fallen within marketing’s ambitious orbit’ (Brown, 1995: 37), and ‘if the claims in introductory textbooks are taken at face value, marketing is not only the secret of business success and personal accomplishment, but it holds the key to socio-economic development, world peace and human understanding’ (Brown, 1995: 163).
