ABSTRACT
Marketing as a body of knowledge and an academic discipline owes a great deal to what Bartels (1976) calls the period of re-conceptualization where the marketing concept and the mix management paradigm (4Ps), introduced in the 1950s and 1960s, defined the nature and content of marketing management (O’Malley and Patterson, 1998). This approach focused predominately on the marketing of products to large homogeneous consumer markets (as existed in the USA). Underpinning this approach are assumptions from micro-economics that markets are efficient, buyers and sellers are anonymous, previous and future transactions are irrelevant and that the price and quality function contains all of the information needed for consumers to make a rational decision (Easton and Araujo, 1994). However, even within this transactional approach to marketing it is obvious that these assumptions are questionable given the increasing importance of marketing communications, branding and relationships in consumers’ decision making in the last 50 years.
