ABSTRACT
The question of what marketing is and what it entails has been the focus of a considerable
amount of work over the past 40 years. From this, numerous definitions have emerged, with
differing emphases on the process of marketing, the functional activities that constitute
marketing, and the orientation (or philosophy) of marketing. The Chartered Institute of
Marketing, for example, defines it as:
“. . . the management process for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.” A slightly longer but conceptually similar definition of marketing was proposed by the
American Marketing Association (AMA) in 1985:
“Marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion and distribution of ideas, goods and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and
organizational objectives.” Although this definition, or variations of it, has been used by a variety of writers (see, for
example, McCarthy and Perreault, 1990; Dibb et al., 1991; Kotler, 1991), Littler and Wilson
(1995, p. 1) have pointed to the way in which ‘its adequacy is beginning to be questioned in
some European textbooks (e.g. Foxall, 1984; Baker, 1987). It could be said that the AMA
definition is more of a list than a definition and is therefore clumsy and inconvenient to use;
that it cannot ever be comprehensive; and that it fails to provide a demarcation as to what
They go on to suggest that the AMA definition presents marketing as a functional process
conducted by the organization’s marketing department, whereas the general thrust of the more
recent literature on marketing theory is that marketing is increasingly being conceptualized as
an organizational philosophy or ‘an approach to doing business’. This strategic as opposed to
a functional approach to marketing is captured both by McDonald (1989, p. 8):
“Marketing is a management process whereby the resources of the whole organization are utilized to satisfy the needs of selected customer groups in order to achieve the objectives of both
parties. Marketing, then, is first and foremost an attitude of mind rather than a series of functional
activities.” and by Drucker (1973), who put forward a definition of marketing orientation:
“Marketing is so basic that it cannot be considered a separate function on a par with others such as manufacturing or personnel. It is first a central dimension of the entire business. It is the whole
business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customers’ point of
view.” A significant shift in emphasis since Drucker wrote this is to be found in the importance that
is now attached to competitive position in a changing world. Thus the marketing concept is that
managerial orientation which recognizes that success primarily depends upon identifying
changing customer wants and developing products and services that match these better than
those of competitors (Doyle, 1987; Wilson and Fook, 1990).
