The Hindu Business Line : Five gurus on the firing line!

WHEN academics study `everything from the costs of globalisation to the benefits of money-back guarantees,' what you get are diverse inputs about marketing, writes Stephen Brown in Writing Marketing, from Sage (www.sagepublications.com) . So diverse that "research methods range from structural equation modelling to `netnography,' a kind of online in-dwelling" and "philosophical perspectives stretch from prim and proper positivism to wild and woolly postmodernism," as the author describes.

Brown deplores the run-of-the-mill marketing writing and mentions a few `very able writers in the marketing academy' you can catch up with. "John Sherry's essay on NikeTown, for example, is a tour de force. Russ Belk's paean to a pair of plastic glasses is as powerful as they come. Beth Hirschman's autobiographical accounts of her manifold addictions are straight from the heart. Craig Thompson is blessed with a turn of phrase that places him on a par with Pulitzer prizewinners ... Hope Schau, Anthony Patterson and Bob Grafton Small are equally gifted."

What's crucial is that the book `interrogates' the works of `five influential marketing academics,' as if placing the gurus on the firing line. Thus, Theodore Levitt is tackled through `reader-response theory'; Philip Kotler is considered from `a Marxian perspective'; Shelby D. Hunt is studied deconstructively; Wroe Alderson is approached biopoetically; and Morris Holbrook gets placed `on the couch'.

Start, therefore, with Levitt, whose seminal 1980s HBR article The Globalisation of Markets earned a full-page criticism by Richard Tompkins in The Financial Times in May 2003 - that the professor's theory failed to stand the test of time. "In literary terms, Ted Levitt's the Tom Clancy-cum-Jackie Collins of marketing discourse, with just a soupcon of Stephen King," describes Brown, and hastens to spot `antimony' as the `single literary concept that encapsulates' Levitt's character, because of "contrasting ideas, images, insights or interpretations that continue to make sense even though they contradict one another."

Thus, Brown finds Levitt's literary style resting on `a congeries of incongruities, oxymorons, paradoxes.' His writing is full of quixotic quips, quotes, quirks and quibbles, charges Brown, and cites lines such as: "When people don't want to come, nothing in the world will stop them."

Next, in the chapter on Kotler's writings, Brown compares him to Karl Marx and says they are `indistinguishable' - "they are cerebral clones, scholarly synonyms, intellectually identical." Among the many parallels that the book mentions are examples on how both the authors used metaphors. Brown points out how Kotler compares marketing to "a computer, a toolkit, an automobile, the atom bomb, a space ship, an airline dashboard, satellite navigation equipment, a `resource conversion' machine and a `gigantic apparatus' of cogwheels, crankshafts, dials, gears and ratchets."

Hunt's style is `magisterial,' according to Brown, because of "the repeated use of rhetorical questions, the pro and con arguments ... the systematic enumeration of points, sub-points, sub-sub-points and so on." Hunt conveys the impression of forensic fearlessness and Solomonic even-handedness through his books, writes Brown engagingly.

Encounter in another chapter the `fiery furnace of marketing thought' of Alderson, such as `transvection,' the series of transactions between producer and consumer. "Wroe was a wannabe number-cruncher," writes Brown commenting on the 24 stages (compared to the usual 4 or 5) of consumer behaviour, 14 steps and 80 tasks (instead of the normal 10 or 12) in marketing planning procedure, 140 ways of setting prices (on electrical products alone), and `exactly 600' customer motives!

Great fun read, if you can digest some criticism of your gurus.

BookMark@TheHindu.co.in

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Five gurus on the firing line!