Marketing communication: principles and practice

MARKETING AS A SOCIAL PROCESS: 
MACRO-MARKETING
Professor Theodore Levitt was clear that marketing is not a means of doing
business, but the mode of sustainable business enterprise. ‘Marketing is not
the devious art of separating the unwary from his [
sic
] loose change . . . It is
a consolidating view of the entire business process’ (Levitt 1969: vii). This
orientation shifts attention from what is done, to 
why
it is done. Instead of
operating against standards (cost, efficiency, productivity, etc.), it operates
against competitors to earn patronage from consumers who become
customers who constantly change the terms on which they will choose one
product and/or supplier over another.
Kline (1993) shows that products in contemporary markets either are
cultural products (e.g. films, TV programmes, art, books, games, sports, toys,
music) or have social value (e.g. prestige, power, style, personal identity,
ceremonial display) related to their ownership and use as both objects and
social symbols.
WEAKNESSES IN TRADITIONAL TEXTBOOK
EXPLANATIONS OF MARKETING 
The institution of the market now ensures that all products are valued
primarily through their exchange. All products are cultural artefacts – selling
them is mostly a matter of communication. As Raymond Williams, scholar
of culture and communication, has noted: ‘marketing communication is a
form of social narrative with the primary task of conveying those fictional
social relations that can only be fulfilled in and through product ownership
and use’ (Williams, 1980).
Most marketing textbooks, and even marketing communication textbooks,
however, include a discussion of ‘communication’ as merely a promotional
tool. They seem to miss the point that marketing 
is
communication designed
to contrive the overlapping of fields of experience.
As Usunier (1993) pointed out also, these textbooks have downplayed or
ignored the need to consider the impact on various cultures (and even on
our conception of culture) of the global marketplace. Marketers need to
understand people as consumers and customers, but also as citizens in their
own lived context.