ABSTRACT
Although historians have now taught us that the idea of applying marketing ideas to key nonprofit contexts such as fundraising has a tradition spanning centuries (Mullin, 1995), it was not until the late 1960s that academic interest in the topic first began to emerge. Kotler and Levy (1969) are credited with opening the academic debate on this issue arguing that marketing had for too long been regarded as a narrow business function and rebuking both academics and practitioners for ignoring the broader relevance of our ideas. At the time their perspective gave rise to much discussion, particularly in the early 1970s (see e.g. Luck, 1969; Ferber, 1970; Lavidge, 1970). Lovelock and Weinberg (1990) argued that this early debate ‘fizzled-out’ in the latter part of that decade as marketers became more concerned with other variants of their discipline and in particular turned their attention to the issue of whether service marketing might be any different from the marketing of products. By the end of the 1970s, Kotler and Levy’s revised definition of marketing as ‘serving human needs and wants sensitively’ (p. 15) was no longer controversial.
