Marketing communication: principles and practice

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Oriented to the customer
Oriented to the
corporation
1,9
9,9
1,1
9,1
Figure 18.2
Levitt’s marketing matrix
Source
: Based on Blake and Mouton’s managerial grid, 1964

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Gummesson (1991) has considered the problem of shifting attention from
marketing management, i.e. the management of marketing, to marketing-
oriented management, i.e. management based on marketing principles.
Others have also urged the defragmentation of specialisms:
marketing is not merely a cluster of related business functions. In a truly
marketing-orientated business, marketing is a deeply ingrained attitude
of mind, shared by everyone in that business.
(Levitt, in Mesdag, 1991: v)
If marketing is seen as a boundary function that manages a continuing series
of impersonal, discrete exchanges (transactions), a critical point is missed.
Many markets have ceased to be essentially competitive and have been
restructured on the basis of voluntary, long-term binding agreements among
participating firms (Arndt, 1979). Moore (1996) speaks of seeking markets
that are relatively free of competition in order to learn without this being
appropriated by others. Examples of these ‘new’ arrangements can be found
in joint ventures, franchises, subcontracting, vertical integration, joint-
product development and joint-marketing contracts. In all cases, transactions
are planned and administered on the basis of negotiated rules of exchange.
Benefits realized for the ‘community’ include reduction of uncertainty in
operations, reduced transaction costs, and economies from avoiding tradi-
tional (promotional) marketing arrangements. Such networks of long-term
cooperation, or domesticated markets, have a degree of stability not envisaged
in mainstream marketing theory.
Already under challenge in the 1970s and 1980s, the general paradigm of
marketing premised on consumer choice and satisfaction and manipulation
of the four Ps, has been criticized as not reflecting reality (see Day and Wensley,
1983, for example). Carman (1980) argued that exchange and related concepts