The 2004 AMA Definition of Marketing and Its Relationship to a Market Orientation: An Extension of Cooke, Rayburn, & Abercrombie (1992)

Abstract

Cooke, Rayburn, and Abercrombie (1992) use historical definitions of marketing to define four major schools of marketing thought. These four schools include the (1) economic utility viewpoint, (2) consumer viewpoint, (3) societal viewpoint, and (4) managerial viewpoint. We suggest that the 2004 AMA definition of marketing creates an additional school of marketing thought, the stakeholder viewpoint. In addition, for over four decades, researchers have used market orientation scales to operationalize what it means for a firm to follow the marketing concept. While the conceptualisation of a market orientation has remained static, the definition of marketing has changed quite dramatically. Few authors have revisited original scale properties and none have addressed the central question of what it means for an organization to be market oriented in the context of the 2004 AMA definition of marketing. As a consequence, market orientation scales have been used sometimes with little consideration as to their relevance. Given changes in the AMA definition of marketing, changes to market characteristics, changes in our understanding of competitive behavior and advances in management theory and scale development, this paper calls for a new scale or scales to be developed that more fully captures the market orientation construct in the context of the 2004 AMA definition of marketing and the “stakeholder” perspective of marketing thought.