TOC -- Adventures in Misplaced Marketing

Textbooks provide useful summaries of material, but they can leave misleading impressions that my students hold as immutable as biblical text. After a book presents the modern marketing concept, the future practitioners believe that all modern successful firms follow a consumer orientation, with the only exceptions found among small or unsuccessful businesses. In reality, many large and successful organizations misplace marketing and instead are actually following an inner-directed production or selling orientation in dealing with customers. However, just because these firms lost the marketing concept's consumer orientation does not mean they are going to be unprofitable. They are just not serving consumer needs. Sometimes products from many firms consistently fail to serve many consumers, so consumer are stuck with what is available. Some people repeatedly go to stores after a bad service experience, especially if alternatives also provide the same bad service. An otherwise bad advertising campaign could seem to generate some desirable consumer reactions by luck or happenstance, with managers unable to see how the dysfunctional messages provide much less than optimal results.

Our class had a lot of material to cover during the term, so I didn't feel we could waste a day. But an assistant to the dean scheduled a guest speaker for us without asking me in advance. When I objected, I was told that the visitor could talk expertly on any topic I had planned to cover. "After all," he said, "your course is only marketing. How difficult can that be?" The basic directives for public health organizations, trade associations and even many government agencies in this section are to "serve public (or members') interests or needs." Logically, this would mean that their decisions should apply a marketing perspective, though in most cases the group's decisions makers don't understand what marketing means. Well, maybe the people in charge don't misunderstand it, but unfortunately, they tend to act as if it's irrelevant. Losing the view of the marketing concept, they follow a production orientation. The misplaced marketing perspectives of this section are most vexing because these groups do not need to maximize profits. Their main agenda is not necessarily political. Whatever the reason, their misplaced marketing results in an organization's failure to serve anyone except for, perhaps, the organization's leaders who feel they are accomplishing something by the sake of the activity.

In the "Star Trek" television programs and movies, each alien culture personifies a human archetype. Ferengi are the marketing-spouting graft-riddled and avarice-driven, traveling the universe searching for profit by any means necessary. Many of the examples in this section involve decisions by people with the world view of graduates of the Ferengi School of Business Ethics. The businesses and organizations of sections I and II misplaced marketing because they were not following a marketing perspective in basic decisions. At best, their consumer orientation was lost and they followed the a production orientation to decisions. The organizations in this section could be doing a good job of applying marketing perspectives, but marketing is either abused or results in outcomes that are not in the best interests of either the customers or society. Businesses satisfy customer needs to help maximize profits. Non-profit organizations find marketing useful to work toward their self-interested concerns. Yet a firm's self-interest might not serve the best interest of the customers and, even if those people were well served, good service to consumer segments is not a societal goal. Giving people benefits they think they need instead of what they should be getting distorts important social values and priorities. And marketing sometimes is attacked for helping a firm maximize profits from products that groups of non-customers would like to make illegal (if they could).