4 The Marketing Book
and much of the output of service industries is
dependent upon manufactured products for its
continued existence. To assume service indus-
tries can replace manufacturing as the heart and
engine of economic growth is naive, to say the
least.
But merely to increase the size of manu-
facturing industry will not solve any of our
current problems. Indeed, the contraction and
decline of our manufacturing industry is not
directly attributable to government and the
City – it is largely due to the incompetence of
industry itself. Those that survive will
undoubtedly be the fittest and all will testify to
the importance of marketing as an essential
requirement for continued success.
However, none of this preamble addresses
the central question ‘What is marketing?’ save
perhaps to suggest that it is a newly emerging
discipline inextricably linked with manufactur-
ing. But this latter link is of extreme importance
because in the evangelical excess of its original
statement in the early 1960s, marketing and
production were caricatured as antithetically
opposed to one another. Forty years later most
marketers have developed sufficient self-con-
fidence not to feel it necessary to ‘knock’ another
function to emphasize the importance and
relevance of their own. So, what is marketing?
Marketing is both a managerial orientation
- some would claim a business philosophy –
and a business function. To understand market-
ing it is essential to distinguish clearly between
the two.
Marketing as a managerial orientation
Management... the technique, practice, or
science of managing or controlling; the skilful
or resourceful use of materials, time, etc.
Collins Concise English DictionaryEver since people have lived and worked
together in groups there have been managers
concerned with solving the central economic
problem of maximizing satisfaction through the
utilization of scarce resources. If we trace the
course of economic development we find that
periods of rapid growth have followed changes
in the manner in which work is organized,
usually accompanied by changes in technology.
Thus from simple collecting and nomadic
communities we have progressed to hybrid
agricultural and collecting communities accom-
panied by the concept of the division of labour.
The division of labour increases output and
creates a need for exchange and enhances the
standard of living. Improved standards of
living result in more people and further increa-
ses in output accompanied by simple mech-
anization which culminates in a breakthrough
when the potential of the division of labour is
enhanced through task specialization. Task
specialization leads to the development of
teams of workers and to more sophisticated
and efficient mechanical devices and, with the
discovery of steam power, results in an indus-
trial revolution. A major feature of our own
industrial revolution (and that of most which
emulated it in the nineteenth century) is that
production becomes increasingly concentrated
in areas of natural advantage, that larger
production units develop and that special-
ization increases as the potential for economies
of scale and efficiency are exploited.
At least two consequences deserve special
mention. First, economic growth fuels itself as
improvements in living standards result in
population growth which increases demand
and lends impetus to increases in output and
productivity. Second, concentration and special-
ization result in producer and consumer becom-
ing increasingly distant from one another (both
physically and psychologically) and require the
development of new channels of distribution
and communication to bridge this gap.
What of the managers responsible for the
direction and control of this enormous diversity
of human effort? By and large, it seems safe to
assume that they were (and are) motivated
essentially by (an occasionally enlightened)