10 The Marketing Book
While much more elaborate formulations con-
taining a dozen or more elements are to be
found in the marketing textbooks such fine
distinctions are not central to the present
inquiry into the nature of marketing. As a
function marketing has as many quirks and
mysteries as research and development, finance
and production but the important point to
establish here is that the adoption of a market-
ing orientation does not mean nor require that
the marketing function should be seen as the
largest or the most important. In fact, in a truly
marketing-orientated organization the need for
a specialized marketing function is probably far
less than it is in a sales- or production-
dominated company. Appreciation of this fact
would do much to disarm the resistance of
other functional specialists who equate the
adoption of a marketing orientation with a
diminution in their own organizational status
and influence.
Ideally, of course, such functional divisions
would not exist. Perhaps, if everyone were
marketing orientated would they disappear to
our continuing competitive advantage?
During the late 1980s and early 1990s there
was considerable evidence to suggest that the
marketing orientation had become so widely
accepted that commentators were beginning to
question the need for a separate marketing
function to assume responsibility for it. Market-
ing’s ‘mid-life crisis’ caused more than a frisson
of anxiety amongst marketing academics and
practitioners alike!
In retrospect it seems that the collapse of
communism in the late 1980s had a significant
effect on managerial perceptions of marketing
and highlighted the need to reconsider its role
and function. During the years following World
War II, politics and economics were dominated
by the ‘super powers’ – the USA and the Soviet
Union – each of which represented a quite
different ideology and approach to economic
organization – capitalism and communism. An
essential difference between the two is that the
former believes in and encourages competition
in free markets while the latter is founded on
central control and an absence of competition in
the marketplace.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the disin-
tegration of the Soviet Union which followed it
would seem to confirm the view that competi-
tion is necessary to encourage change and
progress. But the collapse of communism cre-
ated the kind of dilemma addressed by Cham-
berlin and Robinson in the 1930s which led to
the articulation of the theory of imperfect
competition. Prior to this economists had
focused analysis on the polar opposites of
monopoly (no competition) and perfect com-
petition with only limited attention given to
intermediate conditions such as oligopoly.
Clearly, there are many degrees of competition
in the real world which lie between the polar
extremes and it was these that came to be
designated as imperfect.
The analogy may be extended if one
considers communism to represent monopoly
and the ‘free’ market as perfect competition. It
was against this background that the dominant
model of competition post-1950 was modelled
on the United States and gave rise to what we
now distinguish as the marketing management
paradigm immortalized in Levitt’s (1960) art-
icle, ‘Marketing myopia’, McCarthy’s 4Ps and
Kotler’s seminal (1967) Marketing Management:
Analysis, Planning and Control. Because of its
primacy few gave much attention to free
markets subject to varying degrees of regula-
tion despite the fact that these probably, like
imperfect competition, represented the major-
ity. All that was to change in 1989!
In a penetrating analysis entitled Capital-
isme contre Capitalisme Michel Albert (1991)
pointed out that there is no single, monolithic
definition of capitalism just as there is no single
model of competition. Dussart (1994) elaborated
on this and contrasted the American, Friedma-
nite model of unfettered competition practised
in the USA and UK (Anglo-Saxon competition)
with a modified form to be found in many social
democracies in which a degree of market control
is exercised by the state to moderate the excesses
of big business. This Alpine/Germanic model of