ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a short play depicting, amongst other things, the demise of the marketing academy, and its subsequent, more eclectic revival. The play’s main message is further explored by examining the academy’s forerunner of marketing knowledge development, the marketing concept. A play was chosen as the main means of communicating our message first, and foremost, as a result of the authors’ (the first author in particular) boredom with conventional academic marketing papers. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly as an attempt to move away from yet another ‘scientific’ paper in marketing. The literature already shows the reliance upon the scientific method in marketing (Brown 1995b, Wright and Pickton 1995, Anderson 1994, etc.), and as this work considers issues, for example marcomarketing, which cannot be examined scientifically (Tamilia 1992), then a scientific treatment was obviously not the way forward for us. This said the authors are not aiming to partake in the Hunt versus Anderson debate (see Kavanagh 1994) but simply see their artistic New Literary Form (Brown 1995b) as the most suitable for this chapter. Thus this work should be judged ‘on the basis of its literary and aesthetic value rather than on its functional utility or methodological rigour’ (Kavanagh 1994). As Brown (1995b) stresses,
Marketing paradise, in short, is just around the corner, almost within our grasp, but only if we pray hard enough, pardon our enemies and, last but not least, the lion of marketing science is prepared to lie down with the artistic marketing lamb.
