Wednesday 20 August 2008

When did marketing become a term of abuse?

Here are some excerpts from a press release for Warwick Business School's Nigel Piercy - excellent stuff!

In common usage, the word 'marketing' is little better than a term of abuse. The public image is of institutionalised hucksterism, smoke and mirrors, deception, meaningless brands, and 'spin' and Public Relations.

Managers see marketing departments as untouchable, slippery and expensive, populated with brash wideboys who would do better to show less arrogance.

Professors... stay in marketing and contribute little of any value...

Marketing shows every sign of being a discipline in distress, searching for legitimacy.

Most business school courses in marketing seem to imagine an organizational context of marketing functions that no longer exists...

Teaching is built around a model of marketing programmes that has been largely unchanged since the 1960s - a model enshrined in marketing textbooks...

The result is marketing teaching which ignores the real challenges facing managers in favour of the comfort of familiar textbook notions of what marketing should be about.


RELEVANT LINKS
Press Release for Warwick Business School's Nigel Piercy's new book
Why Marketing Fails - an article
Bright Marketing – the book
Customer Is King – the book

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Agreed, to some extent.

I would say that marketing courses fail to teach creativity and empathy with a marketing audience.

The competition for "eye balls" for instance in advertising is MASSIVE and the notion of a need for timely, clever, targeted and sometimes witty campaigns seem to be lost to the academics. The tend to focus on the process rather than the desired outcomes.

Matt said...

Agreed, to some extent.

I would say that marketing courses fail to teach creativity and empathy with a marketing audience.

The competition for "eye balls" for instance in advertising is MASSIVE and the notion of a need for timely, clever, targeted and sometimes witty campaigns seem to be lost to the academics. The tend to focus on the process rather than the desired outcomes.