Marketing: Broadening the Horizons

Citation

Shapiro, S.J. (2008), "Marketing: Broadening the Horizons", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 42 No. 1/2, pp. 255-257. https://doi.org/10.1108/03090560810841005

This new anthology prepared by Lagrosen and Svensson is intended as companion reading for European students whose introductory marketing texts tend to be American‐designed, managerially‐focused and consumer‐oriented. The editors set out to compile a set of articles that would supplement such texts and neutralize their biases by providing additional material on other aspects of marketing thought and practice. To the extent there had been European contributions in such areas, these were to be highlighted.

This publication contains a set of commissioned chapters on marketing strategy, relationship marketing, business‐to‐business marketing, quality management, supply chain management, brand management, marketing and rhetoric, entrepreneurial marketing, the “Born Global” firm, marketing ethics and the likely future of marketing research. This ambitious intellectual potpourri is then packaged by the Editors within an imaginatively extended “Schools of Marketing Thought” framework.

There are some very strong contributions to this anthology and there are no weak ones. Viewing the book from a North American perspective, I was especially impressed by the coverage of Scandinavian contributions to marketing thought. In particular, this topic is brilliantly treated both in Evert Gummesson's perceptive and wide‐ranging discussion of relationship marketing and the efforts of Hans Jensson to link that concept to network theory and to business‐to‐business marketing.

James Stock presents an excellent discussion of the past, the present, and the likely future of supply chain management and Edvarsson et al. do the same for services marketing. That Hultman and Hills brilliantly treated the differences between small business and entrepreneurial marketing is also noteworthy, if not at all surprising. However, all of the authors submitted very credible contributions.

This reviewer does take issue with the way a few topics were or, more precisely, were not handled. Hair and Money, for example, do a brilliant job of discussing a possible, “likely future” for marketing research. However, I wish they had discussed the twentieth‐century history of that discipline in greater detail. In particular, I think a European audience might have been especially interested in the “Nose Counters” versus “Head Shrinkers” controversy of the 1950s. This debate over the relative merits of statistical sampling as opposed to motivation research was at the core of both the study and the practice of American marketing research at that time. However, the controversy had its intellectual roots in Europe and the chief protagonists, Ernest Dichter and Alfred Politz, had both been pre‐World War II immigrants to the USA.

Lagrosen and Lagrosen discuss quality management within a “Bringing Values to Marketing” framework. I very much wish that, in addition, they had provided specific examples of the use and associated benefits of using quality management within a marketing context. For an example of how this can be brilliantly done, I refer both these authors and their readers to Bill Perrault's discussion of “Building Quality into the (Marketing) Implementation Effort”. This section is to be found in any number of editions of the Basic Marketing textbook since Bill became its lead author.

Similarly, I wish the other Editor, Gören Svensson, had written his chapter on Marketing Ethics with somewhat more of a “how” and, possibly, less of a “why” focus. Mention might also have been made of the fact that being ethical is no easy task when “doing good” does not necessarily result, at least by the time of the next quarterly report, in “doing well”.

This editorial effort contains a first‐rate collection of articles. The shortcomings I have cited are worth mentioning but just. So why, after two careful readings, was I left with the feeling that, somehow, the whole of the collection added up to less than the sum of the parts? This question bothered me for some time. The conclusion I eventually reached was that many of the contributions to this anthology, its title notwithstanding, did not “broaden” the horizons of marketing. Rather, they provided studies in depth (a deepening activity) of topics that can only be briefly covered in a core text.

I consider, for example, that the contributions by Gummesson, Edvarsson et al. (on services marketing), Stock, Hultman and Hills, and Aperia's discussion of his brand management model have this deepening focus. Other contributions, equally good contributions, do indeed fall under the “broadening” rubric. Within this category one might includes Pehrsson's chapter on marketing strategy – which despite its title focuses far more on the business strategy literature; the Lagrosen chapter on quality management; Nilsson's contribution on “Marketing and Rhetoric” and the Andersson discussion of “Born Global” corporations.

The Editors of this collection believe that all of these essays could, and should, be assigned reading in the first marketing course. Perhaps this would indeed be appropriate in European Business Schools. From my North American perspective, I believe the articles I have characterized as “broadening” would be more appropriately assigned in a final year “Marketing Seminar” or “Special Topics” course. In contrast, the “deepening” chapters do belong at the Introductory level but no more or less so than equally cogent treatments of such topics as “Social Marketing”, “New Product Development”, “Marketing and the Internet” and “Sales Force Selection”.

In that certain topics have been chosen for inclusion and others are not, any anthology is a personal statement on the part of its compilers. Similarly, any review – other than those that draw exclusively on the Table of Contents and the material found on a book's back cover – is also a somewhat subjective, if admittedly much briefer, statement. My own subjective conclusion regarding this book is that it deserves careful consideration by those teaching Introductory Marketing, wherever they might be offering such a course. Reading it would be time well spent, in that even the most experienced of instructors could benefit from both occasional deepening and broadening “tune ups”. How this book might subsequently be assigned, if at all, is a separate issue, one likely to depend on a variety of factors ranging from the structure of a School's curriculum to the personal (again that subjective element) preferences and interests of the instructor.