Marketing is everything. Hardly…

If you work in the Marketing field, you will spend most of your professional career worrying about a lot of very similar, yet totally different concepts. You’ll deal with relationship marketing, experience marketing, permission marketing, whatever. If you understand what they are for, why they have been introduced and if they really differ from one another, you’ll be way ahead of your less erudite peers. Believe me, you need the concepts if you are willing to manipulate them.

Marketing, as a discipline, covers a really broad realm, ranging from business activities all the way down to more operational tasks. As of today, Marketing is defined as:

the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
— AMA

The exchange principle, which has traditionally been pivotal to marketing, has rarely (if ever) been questioned. Focusing on an apparent relation between producers and consumers, which also is taken for granted, most theories share a tendency to depict marketing as something that businesses do to consumers.

Exchanging goods for money has always been characteristic to just any organism operating in economic contests way before early marketing principles could be identified and developed. So, establishing the exchange principle as the primary function of marketing, rather then considering it key to the entire organization exhistence, leaves little if no room to separate marketing itself from other vital business functions. This leads me to an old and bold statement by Regis McKenna, which I assume everyone with a semester of Marketing under their belts remember:

Marketing is everything and everything is Marketing
— Regis McKenna

Suggestive, huh? Maybe it’s so, however it’s useless nonetheless, considering it adds little or nothing to the armory of a discipline that doesn’t feature many integrative elements, other than McCarthy’s 4Ps and Borden’s Marketing mix. Ok, maybe we could pull out something more out of the hat, since a lot has been written on the subject, but you get the idea. More generally, the exchange paradigm constrains marketing prerogatives. Stimulating and promoting demand by planning new products, pricing goods in order to attract more clients, managing relationship with new and existing customers, all of these don’t take into account some really important interactions between companies and society, which are foundamental for economic success: for example, responsibilities toward human resources or the environment. Even if these themes have a few in common with exchange of values and don’t belong to customer relationship management tout court, there’s evidence that they must be taken into serious account to survive and prove successfull in any market.

Moreover, the trendy practice of frequently broadening and widening of marketing concepts over time (which never comes to an end) give useful hints about the discipline’s lack of a solid set of principles, a model capable to define the mechanisms of marketing as a whole. Given the unstable situation, marketing is actually not qualified to provide better answers for any of its issues than other non-marketing theories in literature. Even though authors provided a tremendous treasure of valuable knowledge across time, the discipline is still far from presenting a comprehensive theory.