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Broaden marketing's focus to include an organization 's transactions with all of its publics.
One of the signs of the health of a discipline is its willingness to reexamine its focus, techniques, and goals as the surrounding society changes and new problems require attention. Marketing has shown this aptitude in the past. It was originally founded as a branch of applied economics devoted to the study of distribution channels. Later marketing became a management discipline devoted to engineering increases in sales. More recently, it has taken on the character of an applied behavioral science that is concerned with understanding buyer and seller systems involved in the marketing of goods and services.
The focus of marketing has correspondingly shifted over the years. Marketing evolved through a commodity focus (farm products, minerals, manufactured goods, services); an institutional focus (producers, wholesalers, retailers, agents); a functional focus (buying, selling, promoting, transporting, storing, pricing); a managerial focus (analysis, planning, organization, control); and a social focus (market efficiency, product quality, and social impact). Each new focus had its advocates and its critics. Marketing emerged each time with a refreshed and expanded self-concept.
Today marketing is facing a new challenge concerning whether its concepts apply in the nonbusiness as well as the business area. In 1969, Sidney J. Levy and I advanced the view that marketing is a relevant discipline for all organizations insofar as all organizations can be said to have customers and products. This "broadening of the concept of marketing" proposal received much attention, and the AMA's 1970 Fall Conference was devoted to this theme.
Critics soon appeared who warned that the broadening concept could divert marketing from its true purposes and dilute its content. One critic did not deny that marketing concepts and tools could be useful in fundraising, museum membership drives, and presidential campaigns, but felt that these were extracurricular applications of an intrinsically business technology.
Several articles have been published which describe applications of marketing ideas to nonbusiness areas such as health services, population control, recycling of solid wastes, and fundraising. Therefore, the underlying issues should be reexamined to see whether a more generic concept of marketing can be established. The traditional conception of marketing would relegate this discipline to an increasingly narrow and pedestrian...