The Hindu Business Line : Still a young discipline

Marketing fascinates. Do you know why? "Because essentially it's about people, and it brings in so many aspects of people's lives because it's about how we meet our needs," writes Jim Blythe in A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Marketing, from Sage (www.sagepub.co.uk) .

The book is "intended to be the first peanut in the knowledge-nibbling process," not a textbook, cautions the author, whose `learning of marketing' is not formal. "Like a road sweeper, I have picked it up as I went along, and consequently I learned it for fun." Enjoy the book, he urges, and begins with "proper subjects that preceded marketing."

Such as economics. Blythe discovers `the basis of the marketing concept' in a 230-year-old thought — Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations: "Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want ... It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." Thus, the route to marketing success is to consider the customer's needs, interprets the author.

After economists come `behavioural scientists', that is, `psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists of various types'. Real sciences and subdivisions have contributed to marketing, says Blythe. "For example, studies of communication have given us semiotics (the study of signs and the social construction of meaning), syntactics (the study of structure of communication), and semantics (the study of the way words relate to external reality)." Sadly, though, marketing doesn't tap the wisdom of these sciences. Blythe compares marketing academics to `ram raiders' - running in to grab some useful ideas, and running out again `never to return.'

Part II of the book discusses marketing as `a proper subject.' First come the gurus, like E. Jerome McCarthy, Theodore Levitt, Peter Drucker, Stephen Brown and so on. "Gurus are supposed to speak in obscure aphorisms," reads a clue for wannabes. "Writing a couple of interesting textbooks, or an airport bookshop guide to marketing, is not enough to raise you to the peerage."

A chapter devoted to `marketing concepts and contexts' highlights the divide between theory and practice. Simple theories don't seem to work in real life. Why so? "There is always something else that gets in the way — inconsiderate consumers who make irrational decisions, or shareholders who reasonably demand that the company they own should work for their benefit, or rascally employees who think their decent working conditions should come ahead of those whining, demanding, unreasonable consumers."

Another reason for the dichotomy, according to the author, is that marketing academics often act like oracles, "giving their advice in obscure language and with much verbosity." Let not these problems deter you from marketing, because it is still `a young discipline,' says Blythe. "We are still developing the theories, and if we get the level of understanding about consumers that physicists have about the strength of materials, we might really develop some good practice."

The epilogue takes this plea further and argues, "One might say that marketing is so undisciplined it acts like a two-year-old, rather than the 250-year-old it actually is, but the point is that we are still debating what marketing is, where it has come from ... " Agonising? No, says Blythe. For, he sees the debate making marketing "as lively as a basketful of kittens, and as immediate as a punch in the nose," because "young disciplines are like that."

Fun-filled.

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D. Murali