ABSTRACT
The consumer is questioned and the consumer answers. But nobody really understands what the consumer is saying.
Paradoxically, marketing has stupidly painted itself into a corner, although it claims to forecast the future, like a clairvoyant who has lost his or her powers but stubbornly insists on giving advice to customers.
Let us try to understand how, in less than a century, marketing – and, more generally, the Western industrial and commercial complex – has been able to promise happiness by virtue of possessions, a promise that is constantly renewed, with increasing swiftness, recklessly squandering the world’s resources, an issue that was barely mentioned before.
Based on a short survey of the period from 1900 until today, we can readily identify marketing’s various stages during its brief existence and the mistakes it has made. Exuberance, crises, the constant recycling of outdated models, short-termism – today, marketing is reaching the end of its tether. Within a changing overall context, traditional models seem strangely outdated and no longer generate the desired outcomes. Instead, they lead to their own downfall. Marketing causes rejection. Unsuitable applications, denial of a changed society, the world’s complexity, and its new challenges have exceeded marketing’s ability to cope.
