How Broad Should the Marketing Concept Be?

I N EVALUATING the merits of the broadened marketing concept, the issue is not whether marketing concept and techniques may be applied successfully to non-business areas, but whether such extracurricular applications should be treated as an integral part of marketing. There is undoubtedly much potential value of abstracting from current marketing practices by positioning marketing as one of several manifestations of a more embracing, generic, higher-order field, which may be termed "social engineering," "transactional sociology," "relationics," or "exchangeology." However, the fact that a dog is an animal does not permit calling all animals dogs. Similarly, there is little a priori reason for labeling this higher-order field marketing. Such a combined semantic and territorial expansion may threaten the conceptual integrity of marketing, add to the confusion in terminology, and widen the gulf between marketing theory and practice. Moreover, the broadened concept of marketing will have to imperialistically annex a large slice of what today is known as social anthropology and social psychology and also much of the sociology field. There is little evidence that the marketing discipline has the power, conviction, and salesmanship to conquer and defend this territory. While I have much admiration and personal sympathy for the imaginative attempts of Kotler and his associates to broaden marketing functionally, I feel, nevertheless, that this route may tum out to be a blind alley for the discipline. For marketing to beThe Proper Scope... I 101