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MIP 24,2

VIEWPOINT

The malpractice of marketing management

Michael J. Thomas
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
Abstract
Purpose To draw lessons from Peter Duckers change of heart during the half-century between The Practice of Management in 1954 and his death in 2005. Design/methodology/approach Commissioned for the viewpoint series, with permission to think aloud. Findings Concludes that marketing managers and marketing academics should consider their social and cultural role as citizen professionals, and the responsibilities that implies. Instead of talking vaguely about paradigm shifts, they should re-think the future in the context of all-too-evident discontinuity (Drucker) and disruption (Fukuyama), and beware of epistemopathology (Thomas). The alternative is malpractice and mismanagement. Practical implications Marketing practitioners may need to be educated into a radically different conceptual framework for the new century. Originality/value Draws attention to an unquestioned gurus latter-day questioning of the very role of management in society, and proposes practical lessons for marketing management in the future. Keywords Marketing, Marketing theory, Management theory Paper type Viewpoint

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Marketing Intelligence & Planning Vol. 24 No. 2, 2006 pp. 96-101 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0263-4503 DOI 10.1108/02634500610653955

Peter Drucker: a visionary, twice The death of Peter Drucker marks the passing of an era. Throughout my professional career he was the management guru of gurus. Towards the end of his life he questioned the integrity of the market-driven capitalist system. This paper examines the reasons for his disillusionment and leads me to issue a challenge. Will the marketing profession develop itself in the role of social trustee for a just society? Born in Vienna in 1909, Drucker died in California on 11 November 2005, aged 95 years. Jack Welch, former Chairman of General Electric Corporation commented that The world knows he was the greatest management thinker of the last century. Tom Peters saw him as the creator and inventor of modern management. His seminal book, The Practice of Management (Drucker, 1954), puts marketers in the driving seat by telling business to focus on the customer, on satisfying customer needs, and on understanding the nature of competitive advantage: There is no business without a customer. In his view, management was a profession, serving its client groups as doctors serve their patients. He wrote 38 books over his long and productive life, and most certainly inuenced a whole generation of management educators. Less well known is his criticism of the very system that he had analysed and promoted. He became disenchanted with late twentieth century capitalism, with its willingness to reward greed rather than performance, with the growing gap between

management and workers, and senior managers reaping fortunes as they red thousands of workers:
This is morally and socially unforgivable. . . Although I believe in free markets, I have serious doubts about capitalism (Business Week, 2005).

The malpractice of marketing management 97

These concerns must exercise the minds of all marketing professionals, and especially those who research and teach in the discipline. Educators must speculate continuously about how marketing can be made to function more effectively and more efciently in the service of society. That requires us to think about the system in which marketing functions, namely market-driven capitalism. We are in the midst of what Fukuyama (2000) has called the great disruption. Globalisation makes possible worldwide systems of monetary exchange, trade and marketing. Information technology places space-time-place relations in great ux; we have yet to grasp the scope of this disruption. The Marxist view of paradise is totally discredited. We observe a world in thrall to market capitalism, but my fear is that we are all the sightless psychopaths of market forces (Ascherson, 1999). People, places, states and phenomena are all potentially interrelated and interdependent (Friedman, 2005). We know that consumer choice is inuenced by cultural values and lifestyles, and that in the current dialogue, consumer choice is equated with human freedom. This suggests to me at least three questions that demand to be explored: (1) Is consumer freedom of choice, a cornerstone of the marketing philosophy upon which our empires are built, a dishonest invention of marketers, a device merely for justifying our manipulations? (2) Is freedom compatible with well-being? (3) Who has consumer freedom? The challenge of globalisation A partial answer to the last of those is that probably less than one-fth of the worlds population has real discretionary income. The Pareto principle rules: 20 per cent of the worlds population controls 80 per cent of the worlds wealth. In that case, how can the notions of consumer choice be compatible with human well-being, environmental sustainability, indeed with the survival of our species? The push towards globalisation and the accompanying decline of the nation-state leads to fundamental questions about the future of citizenship, and of relations between citizens, consumers, and customers and their suppliers. It is my view that that the marketing profession, most particularly in its academic guise, suffers from epistemopathology. This syndrome is characterised by the mechanical application of diseased, sick, and bad knowledge to contemporary (global) market systems, in self-serving ways, to identify and solve immediate problems, problems which are not well understood and without any consideration of ripple effects on society as a whole. Lindbloom (1990) calls this tendency impairment; Senge (1994) terms it organisational learning disability. We live in a global world, fashioned by the machine, the factory and the assembly line, and in increasingly sophisticated information systems operating in and linking together large-scale networks of bureaucratic organisations. We have been trained and educated in industrialised, bureaucratised schools, colleges and universities. Our profession is an instrument of a market-driven, industrialised, bureaucratic society.

MIP 24,2

We are steeped in, indeed brainwashed by, mechanical, market-driven professionalism. Our watchwords are planning, organising, motivating and controlling. All these are concepts very familiar to Drucker readers. The post-modernists are threatening that familiar status quo. Ambiguity, complexity and chaos challenge our cosy, self-dened world. Future Shock (Tofer, 1970) and paradigm shifts are, in post-reality, the world we now inhabit. Citizen-professionals Let me now focus on the marketing discipline, and propose that its planners, strategists and operational managers must strive towards the ideal of being citizen-professionals. I do so partly because I am a fully paid up member of the class, being a UK Chartered Marketer. That is, I have gained recognition from the Chartered Institute of Marketing, the worlds largest membership organisation for marketing practitioners. It is also because I am interested in the role of the professions in our society. Here is a second set of questions: . Do citizen-professionals really demonstrate social responsibility? . If consumer freedom of choice epitomises the dichotomy between the citizen professional and the private citizen, can interdependency be re-established? . Can democracy, citizenship and socially responsible professionalism be made the hallmarks of the twenty-rst century? . Has mechanical, market-driven professionalism prevailed, at the expense of social trusteeship? . Epistemopathology, impairment, organisational learning disability? I want to propose that, in the era of globalisation, social-trustee civic professionalism has to rule. Narrow self-interest must no longer characterise our professionalism. Citizen-professionals need to minister to the needs and wants of other citizens. We must not pretend, as we have, that we regard the needs and wants of consumers as the grist for our mill, for they cannot universally be equated with the needs and wants of our citizens. We envisage paradise as a globally networked society, dedicated to promoting social welfare. It will contain citizen-professionals, committed to sustainable, integrated, equitable social and economic development, who will thereby promote democracy and ensure social responsibility. In other words, instead of being self-serving, method-bound, narrowly-focussed members of a profession, we will become social trustees of the common good. We will have a clear, comprehensive vision of the good and just society and its place in the world order. We will abandon our pretences about value-neutrality and objectivity (our inheritance from the philosophy of science) and focus on ethics, morals and social responsibility as they confront the citizens of global, cosmopolitan democracies. Figure 1 shows a model for understanding civic professionalism in its social-trusteeship dimension. It may help us to explore a new approach to the role of marketing in civil society. Our critics do argue that markets are organised for purposes of exploitation rather than fullment, that marketing as a function does not possess a monopoly of understanding human wants and values, that:

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Inter-professional Collaboration

Mutual Empowerment: Aspirations, Strengths, Protective Factors

The malpractice of marketing management 99

Sustainable Global Well-Being

Social Trustee ship, Civic Professionalism

Learning Networks And Organisations

Civil Society and Bonds of Social-Cultural Capital

Figure 1. Mutual determination with social trusteeship, civic professionalism

. . . marketings rapacious orientation to consumer needs is more plausibly attributed to the dynamics of capitalism than it is to the development and application of marketing expertise (McKenna, 1991).

The most powerful criticism is directed at the changed role of global corporations. For instance:
Corporations are much more than the purveyors of the products we all want; they are also the most powerful political forces of our time, the driving forces behind bodies such as the World Trade Organisation (Klein, 2000).

A role for marketing educators As a profession we have an unparalleled opportunity. We must demonstrate by our professionalism that we are crucial to the survival both of the organisations we claim to serve, and of society in general. We must be much more forceful in transmitting our professional knowledge. Marketing professionals should become primus inter pares in the new environment, but that will not happen if we fail to demonstrate our superior insights and our willingness to become citizen-professionals. Marketing as a culture means that marketing professionals have a critical role as advocates for customers and for the value system that puts the customer rst. Customers are not dened as only the ultimate purchasers; the concept of internal and external marketing denes them as any downstream contact. Marketing relationships are becoming much more complex, and mutual-dependency relationships, strategic alliances and network organisations require insights well beyond those traditionally associated with the marketing function - namely, the management of promotion and distribution, the management of the sales force, and some opportunities to inuence pricing and product policy. The new insights will derive from such diverse disciplines as political economy, organisation psychology or cultural anthropology, to name but three.

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The most important asset a business has is its ongoing relationships with its global customers. We marketing professionals have a legitimate claim to a profound understanding of the development and nurturing of those relationships. Though increasingly it is claimed that everyone in the corporation must be charged with this responsibility, understanding it and interpreting it should be the domain of the marketing professional. Marketing has a powerful rhetoric. We do not lack ideological materials. We have more than just a set of techniques for the management of external markets. Our exible ideology, our disposition to accept change as the inevitable consequence of the interplay of market forces would, however, be hijacked by others for quite different purposes. We need to market marketing, certainly as a culture, and more effectively as strategy, since it is surely no longer possible to differentiate corporate strategy from marketing strategy, nor to separate corporate welfare from the welfare of society? A manifesto We must improve our reputation as knowledge generators, through strategic linkages and alliances with leading-edge knowledge generators. We must demonstrate, perhaps by benchmarking, that the most successful companies are those that are truly market-driven and responsible global citizens. We marketing professionals and marketing educators must be developing insights that pre-empt the future. More urgently perhaps, we must recognise that in addition to high standards of objectivity, integrity and technical competence, we need, in responding to the changing environment, to demonstrate that we can and will serve society in general. This requires clear and articulate demonstration of our ability to be relevant in the political sense. Accountants have been successful in part because they have been so obviously servants of Anglo-American capitalism with its historical focus on nance. (Though this is not the right forum to discuss this, we could develop an argument that this historic focus has served us poorly in competition with the Japanese.) In the global economy, and in the face of the competitive forces within it, it is the company and the country that delivers value to the market place that will survive. If we remain tied to the forces of manipulation and hype, if we are seen merely to be the servants of our capitalist masters, we will remain marginal and untrustworthy. If we can demonstrate that we have the keys to the knowledge base that will benet society as a whole, then we may prosper. Peter Drucker spent a lifetime analysing the nature of management in both the corporate and not-for-prot sectors. We will do well to re-read him, one of the greatest management thinkers of the century we have just left.
References Ascherson, N. (1999), The indispensable Englishman, New Statesman, 29 January, p. 26. Business Week (2005), The man who invented management, Business Week, 28 November, p. 102. Drucker, P.F. (1954), The Practice of Management, Harper Collins, New York, NY. Friedman, T.L. (2005), The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, NY.

Fukuyama, F. (2000), The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order, Prole Books, London. Klein, N. (2000), No Logo, Flamingo, London. Lindbloom, C. (1990), Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. McKenna, R. (1991), Relationship Marketing, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA. Senge, P. (1994), The Fifth Discipline Field Book, Doubleday, New York, NY. Tofer, A. (1970), Future Shock, The Bodley Head, London. Further reading Drucker, P.F. (1969), The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to our Changing Society, Heinemann, London. Drucker, P.F. (1999), Management Challenges in the 21st Century, Harper Collins, New York, NY. Drucker, P.F. (2002), Managing in the Next Century, St Martins Press, London. Thomas, M.J. (2002), Thoughts on building a just market society, Journal of Public Affairs, Vol. 2, pp. 9-15.

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