مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد بازاریابی برای ثبات: بسط مفهوم سازی مارکتینگ میکس برای کسب ارزش افراد و جامعه در کل ( الزویر )

مقاله سال 2017

The American Marketing Association’s (2013) defining of marketing has repositioned our conceptualisation of marketing, moving it away from the (2004) notion of managing value-based customer relationships that benefit the organisation and its stakeholders to managing the “exchange of offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large” (American Marketing Association, 2013), and departing significantly further from the 1985 definition, which considered only the interests of individuals and organisations, and regarded marketing as: “the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational objectives” (Lusch, 2007). According to Gundlach and Wilkie (2009), the AMA’s new aggregate view of marketing (“and its systemic properties”, p. 263) recognises a role and responsibility for creating value broadly, “which easily translates into conceptions of markets and people being affected by marketers’ actions” (p. 263), and positions its thought and practice for the future, “equipping scholars and practitioners with the capacity to address marketing’s ever-increasing complexity” (p. 263).

The AMA’s conceptualisation of marketing is “considered the standard both for marketing practice and for academic research and education” (Grönroos, 2006, p. 398). While marketing is still about creating value for individual consumers, it now also recognises the importance of partners, and the need for the simultaneous creation of environmental and social value for society at large. The new definition echoes the societal orientation argued for almost half a century earlier by, for example, Kotler and Levy (1969) and Lazer (1969). Marketing’s repositioning has called for new approaches to accommodate value creation for society at large, including calls for it to help ameliorate the impacts of climate change. Value for society at large might be equated to the concept of sustainable development, described as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987, p. 43). These needs have recently been articulated through the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, 2015).

In celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Journal of Marketing, Kotler, (2011) called for not less than the discipline’s reinvention, arguing that, to address pressure from consumers to change marketing practices, as consumers were no longer choosing brands on functional and emotional grounds only, but also on how companies meet their social responsibilities, “companies must address the issue of sustainability” (p. 132). Similar cries have risen in services marketing (Ostrom et al., 2015), especially as marketing has been under pressure in recent years to prove its contribution to company performance and also develop new capabilities in such diverse fields as new digital communications, the co-creation of value with end-users, and sustainability (Tollin and Schmidt, 2012, pp. 509–10). Not all have recognised the imperative of marketing’s new role, however. Kumar, (2015), for example, while highlighting the need for “new thinking in marketing” (p. 6) did not include mention of sustainability in his recent look at what has happened and what to look out for in the discipline, but did lament the decline of conceptual articles and noted calls “from within the community” for more conceptual articles and marketing scholarship (p. 6).