Gotterdammering for Marketing?

Abstract

WHILE external signals increasingly suggest the likelihood of radical environmental shifts, most U. S. marketers continue to extrapolate a future based essentially on a relatively stable and comfortable past. The dangers of such a practice have been placed in a broader managerial perspective by C. Northcote Parkinson in his tongue-in-cheek but eminently sensible work1 arguing that when organizations approach their peak of development, they tend to exchange ideological drive for institutional trappings. Despite the unquestioned success of marketing in business and in some nonbusiness enterprise, and despite the fact that it has become a dominant cultural phenomenon, there are strong portents that U. S. Marketing may already be in a state of institutional arteriosclerosis (if I may further mix the mixed metaphors of the article's title and subtitle!). In order to identify directions for future marketing development, I have systematically reviewed and analyzed hundreds of articles, speeches, books, and monographs bearing on the subject, principally those published during the past five years. These sources have been compared with broad environ-